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Parallel expanded event simulation of tightly coupled systems
Publikationstyp
Journal Article
Date Issued
2016
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Volume
26
Issue
2
Article Number
12
Citation
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation 26 (2): 12 (2016)
Publisher DOI
Scopus ID
The technical evolution of wireless communication technology and the need for accurately modeling these increasingly complex systems causes a steady growth in the complexity of simulation models. At the same time, multi-core systems have become the de facto standard hardware platform. Unfortunately, wireless systems pose a particular challenge for parallel execution due to a tight coupling of network entities in space and time. Moreover, model developers are often domain experts with no in-depth understanding of parallel and distributed simulation. In combination, both aspects severely limit the performance and the efficiency of existing parallelization techniques. We address these challenges by presenting parallel expanded event simulation, a novel modeling paradigm that extends discrete events with durations that span a period in simulated time. The resulting expanded events form the basis for a conservative synchronization scheme that considers overlapping expanded events eligible for parallel processing. We then put these concepts into practice by implementing Horizon, a parallel expanded event simulation framework specifically tailored to the characteristics of multi-core systems. Our evaluation shows that Horizon achieves considerable speedups in synthetic as well as real-world simulation models and considerably outperforms the current state-of-theart in distributed simulation.
Subjects
Conservative synchronization | Multi-core systems | Parallel discrete event simulation | Simulation modeling paradigm | Wireless systems
DDC Class
005: Computer Programming, Programs, Data and Security