Novel performance optimization of large-scale discrete-event simulation on the Cell Broadband Engine

Abstract

This paper presents a computing technique for efficient parallel simulation of large-scale discrete-event models on the IBM Cell Broadband Engine (CBE), which has one Power Processor Element (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE). Based on the general-purpose Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS), the technique tackles all performance bottlenecks, combining multi-dimensional parallelism and various optimizations. Preliminary experiments have produced very promising results, attaining speedups up to 134.34 and 41.23 over the baseline implementation on PPE and on Intel Core2 Duo E6400 processor respectively. The methods can also be applied to other multicore and shared-memory architectures. We conclude that the technique not only allows discrete-event simulation users to tap CBE potential without being distracted by multicore programming, but also provides insight on migration of legacy software to current and future multicore platforms.