Transparent Distributed Cross-State Synchronization in Optimistic Parallel Discrete Event Simulation

Matteo Principe, Alessandro Pellegrini, Francesco Quaglia, and Bruno Ciciani

Abstract:
In this report we tackle transparent deploy and seamless execution of sequentially-coded Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) models on distributed computing architectures. We present an innovative distributed synchronization protocol which allows, in conjunction with ad-hoc Operating System memory management facilities, to access the simulation state of any concurrent Logical Process (LP) running on any node of the distributed computing environment, as if it were locally hosted by a unique node—more specifically, by a unique address space. By relying on our facilities, the simulation model developer is not required to implement neither explicit message passing, nor to rely on annotations or specific programming constructs. He can simply code the accesses to the LPs’ states in place (e.g. via pointers), which significantly simplifies the software development process. The burden of synchronization and correct handling of these accesses is demanded from our user-space and kernel-space runtime environment. Our proposal targets Linux on x86 64 systems and has been integrated within the ROOT-Sim open-source optimistic simulation platform, although its design principles, and most parts of the developed software, are of general relevance.

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