Optimization of Parallel Discrete Event Simulator for Multi-core Systems

Abstract

Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) can substantially improve performance and capacity of simulation, allowing the study of larger, more detailed models, in shorter times. PDES is a fine-grained parallel application whose performance and scalability are limited by communication latencies. Traditionally, PDES simulation kernels use processes that communicate using message passing, shared memory is used to optimize message passing for processes running on the same machine. We report on our experiences in implementing a thread-based version of the ROSS simulator. The multithreaded implementation eliminates multiple message copying and significantly minimizes synchronization delays. We study the performance of the simulator on two hardware platforms: a Core i7 machine and a 48-core AMD Opteron Magny-Cours system. We identify performance bottlenecks and propose and evaluate mechanisms to overcome them. Results show that multithreaded implementation improves performance over the MPI version by up to a factor of 3 for the Core i7 machine and 1.2 on Magny-cours for 48-way simulation.