Benchmarking parallel simulation algorithms

Abstract

Parallel simulation has been an active research area for more than a decade. The parallel simulation community needs a common benchmark suite for performance evaluation of parallel simulation environments. Performance evaluation of a parallel simulation environment is harder than evaluating a parallel processing system, since the underlying system is nor only composed of architecture and operating system, but also of simulation kernel. Thus, simulation kernel designers often confront a twofold task: (i) to evaluate how efficiently their simulation kernel runs on certain architectures; and (ii) to evaluate how simulation problems scale using this kernel In this paper we advocate an incremental benchmarking methodology that focuses on the evaluation of a parallel simulation system which is based on Time Warp. We start from a reduced set of ping models that can effectively estimate the various overheads, contention and latencies of Time Warp running on a multiprocessor. The benchmark suite has been used to locate several sources of overhead in an existing Time Warp implementation. Using this benchmark suite we also compare the performance of the improved version of the Time Warp implementation with the original one.