Introduction to the Special Section on PADS 2020

Abstract

This special section highlights four articles extended from papers that appeared in the 2020 ACM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS). It has been a tradition that ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) showcases some of the best papers from the SIGSIM flagship conference each year. This special section is edited by Philippe J. Giabbanelli and Christopher D. Carothers, who served as the conference program chairs and were responsible for the proceedings of the conference. Jason Liu was the general chair of the conference and helped with the initial organization of this special section. The articles appearing in this special section have also benefited from the help of Francesco Quaglia, who is the Editorin-Chief of ACM TOMACS, and assistance from the ACM publishing staff. The outcome of the selection process identified seven articles as possible candidates for this special section, as they were highly ranked based on reviews by the Technical Program Committee of SIGSIM-PADS 2020. Authors from each of the seven articles were invited to propose a substantial extension of their original conference papers to the editors of the special section. Accepted proposals were then given a deadline that allowed authors to perform the proposed work. To ensure quality, the extended manuscripts were peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers. All of the articles in this special section have undergone multiple rounds of reviews, so authors had the opportunity to carefully address the suggestions by the reviewers. Based on this process, the special section finally consists of four articles. The first article, entitled “Mechanisms for Precise Virtual Time Advancement in Network Emulation,” describes a new software modeling tool called Kronos that enables the precise instruction level tracking of process execution and control over the scheduling of containers. Kronos not only improves the mapping of runtime behaviors to the advancement of time but also enables the behavior of the emulation independent of the platform CPU resources that is hosting the emulation. This work demonstrates that Kronos is able to accurately control process execution at very small time-slices and in turn precisely model CPU instructions and traffic flows in large-scale networks. The original paper, from which this article is extended, won the 2020 SIGSIM-PADS Best Paper Award. The second article, entitled “Generating Fast Specialized Simulators for Stochastic Reaction Networks via Partial Evaluation,” presents a novel rule-based, partial evaluation approach that generates a specialized model-specific algorithm that yields a high-performance biochemical reaction network simulation. In particular, the evaluation conducted by the authors demonstrates that a combination of profile-guided optimization and partial evaluation techniques yields an impressive 16× performance improvement! The third article, entitled “A Scalable Quantum Key Distribution Network Testbed Using Parallel Discrete-Event Simulation,” explores the efficacy of using parallel simulation approaches for