State saving for interactive optimistic simulation

Abstract

Time Warp's optimistic scheduling requires the maintenance of simulation state history to support rollback in the event of causality violations. State history, and the ability to rollback the simulation, can provide unique functionality for human-in-the-loop simulation environments. This paper investigates the use of Time Warp to output valid simulation state in a near real-time manner, re-execute portions of the simulation, and interactively probe simulation values to ascertain underlying causes of transient behavior.A shared-memory, multi-threaded interactive simulation architecture is presented and the additional state saving requirements imposed by interactivity are examined. The shortcomings of existing state saving schemes lead us to propose Multiplexed State Saving (MSS). By interleaving checkpointing and incremental state logs MSS provides bounded rollback costs and asynchronous access to prior simulation state. The interaction algorithms and MSS form a scalable, bounded cost component suitable for use in a real-time interactive Time Warp system.