Stack-free process-oriented simulation

Abstract

The process interaction world view is widely used in the general simulation community for its expressive power, and is supported by most modern simulation languages. In parallel discrete event simulation, however, its use remains comparatively rare due to the perceived inefficiency (and difficulty) of parallel implementations.We present a new implementation strategy for parallel process-oriented simulation languages. This innovative, semantics-based approach directly addresses two common concerns of such languages. By concentrating on the intrinsic threads of control, we avoid the proliferation of simulation objects (and their associated costs) that might result from a naive translation. More fundamentally, the primary costs associated with process-oriented languages -- those of context switching between stacks and, in an optimistic setting, of saving the state of these stacks -- are entirely eliminated since our explicit use of continuations avoids the need for stacks in the first place. We similarly obtain cheap and natural thread preemption.