Parallel and Distributed Simulation

Abstract

Parallel and distributed simulation (PDS) over the one and a half decade of its existence has turned out to be more foundational than merely solving the causality preservation di lemma in partially ordered event structures as they occur in parallel and distributed simulation executions. Today’s availability of parallel and distributed computing and communication technology ha.s given a new relevance to the field that could not, ha.ue been foreseen in its early days. The potentia,l improvement of elapsed time for large simula.tion experiments via the involvement of a set of individua.1 processing nodes of a parallel (shared or distributed memory) computer or distributed system is more promising t,oclay than at any time in history of the field. Accelerating simulation experiments for la.rge syst,em models is naturally the outstanding PDS resea.rch goal. But above this, many scientists, also from within the core of classical PDS field, have seen imp& of the PDS theory and methodology also in nonsta.nda.rd a.pplication areas such as parallel program execution. The intent, of this minitrack was to provide a forum for t,he exploration of new high performance simula.tion concepts and techniques, as well as their successful a.pplication on today’s and tomorrow’s parallel execution pla.tforms. Twenty-six contributions have been submitted by a.utjhors from France, Germany, Japa.n, Poland, Sweden, UK and the USA, after more than seventy authors a~nnouacecl pa.pers via abstracts. Eighty-four reviewers wit#h their expertise helped to select ten full papers a.nd two short papers for publication in the proceedings, a,ncl for oral presentation at the conference. Ea.& paper was reviewed by at least three, at most, six, and on a,verage by 3.96 reviewers. Due to t)he a.va.ilability of pa.pers in electronic format, the reviewing process could be managed almost exclusively by email. A concept8ual framework and an environment for high performance simulation is presented in the first paper. Zeigler, Moon, D. Kim and J.G. Kim propose the DEVS formalism for system modeling, and a DEVS implementation based on object oriented technology enabling a full exploita,tion of a para.llel simulation model execution. DEVS modeling is illustra.ted in the context of wildland fire simulation, performance comparisons a.re conducted for a, watershed model executing sequentially on a. Spare-1000 a.ncl in para.llel on a CM-5. The paper by Konas presents potentials of simulation a.t the confluence of object oriented system design and parallel processing: modularity, extensibility and reusability provide a na.tural a.nd well structured approach to the construction of complex simulation models, while at the same time promoting a higher execution efficiency on a. parallel platform. Young and Wilsey propose a new distributed fossil collection technique for the Time Wa.rp distributed discrete event simulation protocol. Basically, every fossil collector associated with a logical process (LP) by observing event arrival t imes establishes a. statistical model for rollback distances to determine in conjunction with a user defined rise fa.ctor tha.t controls the aggressiveness of fossil collectors a. probabilistic GVT bound. The approach appears beneficial for the reduction of the amount of used memory over GVT based fossil collection, but requires a.dditional checkpointing for possible “ca.tastrophic” rollbacks, i.e. restoration of states that have been fossil collected due to an overestimation of the actual GVT. RGnngren, Barriga a,nd Ayani have developed a benchmark suite for the performance evalua.tion of parallel simulation kernels on different a.rchitect,ures and the scalability analysis of certain simulation problems. It appears particularly hard t,o isolate performance influences stemming from the kernel a.s such or from the event structure underlying the simulation model executed by the kernel. Trying to a,bstra,ct a.s much a,s possible from the la.tter performance impact, the authors construct a. synthetic benchmark scala,ble