Massively parallel simulation of a class of discrete event systems

Abstract

The authors describe a novel approach for the simulation of discrete-event systems on massively parallel computers. In spite of considerable partial parallelism that exists in discrete-event systems, the simulation of a single discrete-event system is intrinsically asynchronous and highly data dependent, and its implementation on massively parallel SIMD (single-instruction multiple-data) computers is particularly difficult. The authors propose to simulate several such systems simultaneously, and in parallel. These are variants of a nominal system with different system parameter values or operating policies. A single clock mechanism is used that drives all the variants in parallel, synchronizes their trajectories, and is the basis of the SIMD implementation. The authors describe a general discrete-event simulator that is developed for implementation on the SIMD MasPar MP-1 computer, and they address the computational issues related to their approach in this context.<>