The role of partitioning in Time Warp simulation

Abstract

This paper examines one of the major issues associated with Time Warp simulation-the impact of partitioning on the Time Warp performance. The experimental work described, which uses a combination of a network of transputers and a multiprocessor emulator, focuses on the impact of partitioning on the simulation performance. Various results from the Time Warp simulation of a number of test circuits are obtained and presented. The simulation execution times using different partitioning strategies are compared and relevant analysis is made. A number of models are proposed and derived. The experimental results show that a good partitioning strategy, such as the bh method proposed in this work, is critical in improving the Time Warp simulation performance in an environment where the simulation problems contain loop structures and the off-processor communication cost per message is high. In addition, the results obtained from various experiments are consistent with the models proposed in this work.