Dealing with Reversibility of Shared Libraries in PDES

Abstract

State recoverability is a crucial aspect of speculative Time Warp-based Parallel Discrete Event Simulation. In the literature, we can identify three major classes of techniques to support the correct restoration of a previous simulation state upon the execution of a rollback operation: state checkpointing/restore, manual reverse computation and automatic reverse computation. The latter class has been recently supported by relying either on binary code instrumentation or on source-to-source code transformation. Nevertheless, both solutions are not intrinsically meant to support a reversible execution of third-party shared libraries, which can be pretty useful when implementing complex simulation models. In this paper, we present an architectural solution (realized as a static C library) which allows to transparently instrument at runtime any third party shared library, with no need for any modification to the model's code. We also present a preliminary experimental evaluation, based on the integration of our library with the ROOT-Sim simulation engine.