Cross-State Events: a New Approach to Parallel Discrete Event Simulation and its Speculative Runtime Support

Alessandro Pellegrini and Francesco Quaglia

Abstract:
We present a new approach to Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES), where we enable the execution of so-called cross-state events. During their processing, the state of multiple concurrent simulation objects can be accessed in read/write mode, as opposed to classical partitioned accesses. This is done with no pre-declaration of this type of access by the programmer, hence also coping with non-determinism. In our proposal, cross-state events are supported by a speculative runtime environment fully transparently to the application code. This is done through an ad-hoc memory management architecture and an extension of the classical Time Warp synchronization protocol. This extension, named Event and Cross-State (ECS) synchronization, ensures causally-consistent speculative parallel execution of discrete event applications by allowing all events to observe the snapshot of the model execution trajectory that would have been observed in a timestamp-ordered execution of the same model. An experimental assessment of our proposal shows how it can significantly reduce the application development complexity, while also providing advantages in terms of performance

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