Benchmarking Memory Management Capabilities within ROOT-Sim

Abstract

In parallel discrete event simulation techniques, the simulation model is partitioned into objects, concurrently executing events on different CPUs and/or multiple CPUCores.In such a context, run-time supports for logical time synchronization across the different simulation objectsplay a central role in determining the effectiveness of the specific parallel simulation environment. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of the memory management capabilities offered by the ROme OpTimistic Simulator (ROOT-Sim). This is an open source parallel simulation environment transparently supporting optimistic synchronization via recoverability (based on incremental log/restore techniques) of any type of memory operation affecting the state of simulation objects, i.e., memory allocation, deallocation and update operations. The experimental study is based on a synthetic benchmark which mimics different read/write patterns inside the dynamic memory map associated with the state of simulation objects. This allows sensibility analysis of time and space effects due to the memory management subsystem while varying the type and the locality of the accesses associated with event processing.