The effect of synchronization requirements on the performance of distributed simulations

Abstract

Recent experiments have shown that conservative methods can achieve good performance by exploiting the characteristics of the system being simulated. In this paper we focus on the interrelationship between run time and synchronization requirements of a distributed simulation. A metric that considers the effect of lookahead and the physical rate of transmission of messages, and an arrival approximation that models the effect of synchronization requirements on the run time are developed. It is shown that even when good lookahead is exploited in the system, poor run-time performance is achieved if an inefficient mapping of LPs to processors is used.