Parallelism analyzers for parallel discrete event simulation

Abstract

Discrete event simulation is usually time consuming. Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in using parallel computers to speed up the simulation process. Before the parallel simulation approach is applied, it is important to understand the inherent parallelism of simulation applications. A simple technique called critical path analysis was proposed to study paralllelism of simulation applications. This paper describes three critical path analysis algorithms based on different event-scheduling (process scheduling) policies. These algorithms are much simpler than a previous approach, where the events must be recorded in a trace and an extra pass is required to process the event trace. In our approach, the critical path analysis algorithms are integrated with the sequential simulation. At the end of the sequential simulation, the optimal parallel execution time is also computed. Livny proposed an algorithm similar to our approach (His, however, was designed for a specific language). Our algorithms can be integrated with sequential simulation programs written by users or be integrated with simulation languages. Another advantage of our algorithms over previous approaches is that ours can be used to study load balancing under different event-scheduling policies. Since our algorithms can be easily inserted in sequential simulation programs, critical path analysis can be applied to existing sequential programs without difficulty. The results can then be used to predict the performance of parallel simulation on similar applications. An example is given to show how useful information can be obtained from our algorithms.