Efficient aggregation of multiple PLs in distributed memory parallel simulations

Abstract

The state of research in parallel simulation now demands that we experiment with a multitude of simulation models. It is evident that large-scale simulations involving many interacting logical processes should be a focal point of such experimentation, as large-scale simulations will benefit the most from parallelism. This realization raises a number of issues. Large-scale parallel simulations must aggregate many logical processes onto each machine in a distributed memory architecture. This fact creates internal management problems---how does one synchronize in such a setting? How does one efficiently find and manage the simulation workload? If we are to experiment with multiple models, what underlying functions can we extract to program once, and use many times? This paper describes YAWNS, Yet Another Windowing Network Simulator, for dealing with these problems.