The Effect of Memory Capacity on Time Warp Performance

Abstract

The behavior of n interacting processes synchronized by the "Time Warp" rollback mechanism is analyzed under the constraint that the total amount of memory to execute the program is limited. In Time Warp, a protocol called "cancelback" has been proposed to reclaim storage when the system runs out of memory. A discrete state, continuous time Markov chain model for Time Warp augmented with the cancelback protocol is developed for a shared memory system with n homogeneous processors and homogeneous workload with constant message population. The model allows one to predict speedup as the amount of available memory is varied. The performance predicted by the model is validated through performance measurements on an operational Time Warp system executing on a shared-memory multiprocessor using a workload similar to that in the model. It is observed that if the sequential simulation requires m message buffers, Time Warp with a small fraction of message buffers beyond m performs almost as well as Time Warp with unlimited memory.