Assessing load-sharing within optimistic simulation platforms

The advent of multi-core machines has lead to the need for revising the architecture of modern simulation platforms. One recent proposal we made attempted to explore the viability of load-sharing for optimistic simulators run on top of these types of machines. In this article, we provide an extensive experimental study for an assessment of the effects on run-time dynamics by a load-sharing architecture that has been implemented within the ROOT-Sim package, namely an open source simulation platform adhering to the optimistic synchronization paradigm. This experimental study is essentially aimed at evaluating possible sources of overheads when supporting load-sharing. It has been based on differentiated workloads allowing us to generate different execution profiles in terms of, e.g., granularity/locality of the simulation events. © 2012 IEEE

Load-sharing policies in parallel simulation of agent-based demographic models

Execution parallelism in agent-Based Simulation (ABS) allows to deal with complex/large-scale models. This raises the need for runtime environments able to fully exploit hardware parallelism, while jointly offering ABS-suited programming abstractions. In this paper, we target last-generation Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) platforms for multicore systems. We discuss a programming model to support both implicit (in-place access) and explicit (message passing) interactions across concurrent Logical Processes (LPs). We discuss different load-sharing policies combining event rate and implicit/explicit LPs’ interactions. We present a performance study conducted on a synthetic test case, representative of a class of agent-based models.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft