Hybrid scheduling for event-driven simulation over heterogeneous computers

Abstract

In this work we propose a new scheduling approach designed from scratch to maximize heterogeneous computers usage and the event processing flow at the same time. The scheduler is built based on three fundamental concepts which introduces a new vision of discrete event simulation: 1) events are clustered according to their potential time parallelism on one hand and to their potential process and data similarity on the other hand. 2) events meta-data is enhanced with additional descriptor which simplifies and accelerates the scheduling decision. 3) the simulation is hybrid time-event driven rather than time- or event-driven. The concretization of our approach is denoted the H-scheduler which uses several processes to manage the event flow. Furthermore we propose a dynamic scheduling optimization which aims to further maximize the event flow. The combination of those features allows the H-scheduler to provide the highest efficiency rate compared to the majority of GPU and CPU schedulers. In particular it goes beyond the default Cunetsim Scheduler by 90% in average while it keeps a significant lead on existing simulators.