Performance analysis of time warp simulation with cascading rollbacks

Abstract

The paper presents an analytical model for evaluating the performance of Time Warp simulators. The proposed model is formalized based on two important time components in parallel and distributed processing: computation time and communication time. The communication time is modeled by buffer access time and message transmission time. Logical processes of the Time Warp simulation, and the processors executing them are assumed to be homogeneous. Performance metrics such as rollback probability, rollback distance, elapsed time and Time Warp efficiency are derived. More importantly, we also analyze the impact of cascading rollback waves on the overall Time Warp performance. By rendering the deviation in state numbers of sender-receiver pairs, we investigate the performance of throttled Time Warp scheme. Our analytical model shows that the deviation in state numbers and the communication delay have a profound impact on Time Warp efficiency. The performance model has been validated against implementation results obtained on a Fujitsu AP3000 parallel computer. The analytical framework can be readily used to estimate performance before the Time Warp simulator is implemented.