Synchronisation for dynamic load balancing of decentralised conservative distributed simulation

Abstract

Synchronisation mechanisms are essential in distributed simulation. Some systems rely on central units to control the simulation but central units are known to be bottlenecks. If we want to avoid using a central unit to optimise the simulation speed, we lose the capacity to act on the simulation at a global scale. Being able to act on the entire simulation is an important feature which allows to dynamically load-balance a distributed simulation. While some local partitioning algorithms exist, their lack of global view reduces their efficiency. Running a global partitioning algorithm without central unit requires a synchronisation of all logical processes (LPs) at the same step. The first algorithm requires the knowledge of some topological properties of the network while the second algorithm works without any requirement. The algorithms are detailed and compared against each other. An evaluation shows the benefits of using a global dynamic load-balancing for distributed simulations.