Scheduling critical channels in conservative parallel discrete event simulation

Abstract

This paper introduces the Critical Channel Traversing (CCT) algorithm, a new scheduling algorithm for both sequential and parallel discrete event simulation. CCT is a general conservative algorithm that is aimed at the simulation of low-granularity network models on shared-memory multi-processor computers. An implementation of the CCT algorithm within a kernel called TasKit has demonstrated excellent performance for large ATM network simulations when compared to previous sequential, optimistic and conservative kernels. TasKit has achieved two to three times speedup on a single processor with respect to a splay tree central-event-list based sequential kernel. On a 16 processor (R8000) Silicon Graphics PowerChallenge, TasKit has achieved an event-rate of 1.2 million events per second and a speedup of 26 relative to the sequential kernel for a large ATM network model. Performance is achieved through a multi-level scheduling scheme that supports the scheduling of large grains of computati...