Programmability and Performance of Parallel ECS-based Simulation of Multi-Agent Exploration Models

While the traditional objective of parallel/distributed simulation techniques has been mainly in improving performance and making very large models tractable, more recent research trends targeted complementary aspects, such as the “ease of programming”. Along this line, a recent proposal called Event and Cross State (ECS) synchronization, stands as a solution allowing to break the traditional programming rules proper of Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) systems, where the application code processing a specific event is only allowed to access the state (namely the memory image) of the target simulation object. In fact with ECS, the programmer is allowed to write ANSI-C event-handlers capable of accessing (in either read or write mode) the state of whichever simulation object included in the simulation model. Correct concurrent execution of events, e.g., on top of multi-core machines, is guaranteed by ECS with no intervention by the programmer, who is in practice exposed to a sequential-style programming model where events are processed one at a time, and have the ability to access the current memory image of the whole simulation model, namely the collection of the states of any involved object. This can strongly simplify the development of specific models, e.g., by avoiding the need for passing state information across concurrent objects in the form of events. In this article we investigate on both programmability and performance aspects related to developing/supporting a multi-agent exploration model on top of the ROOT-Sim PDES platform, which supports ECS

The ROme OpTimistic Simulator: A Tutorial

In this tutorial we present the ROme OpTimistic Simulator (ROOT-Sim), a general-purpose Parallel Discrete Event simulation platform built according to the optimistic synchronization scheme, which allows - via the adoption of a simple/reduced API - to implement simulation models via event handlers relying on standard ANSI-C. We present the set of paradigms which ROOT-Sim is built on, and its internal design, along with the offered facilities. We also explain the simulation-model programming paradigm, and give an example of a basic simulation model, which stands as a building block for more complex ones. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg