A Fine-grained Parallel Approach for one Logical Process on Multi-core Machines

Abstract

Currently, the time management algorithms applied in various parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) engines take the logical process as the smallest parallel unit which corresponds to a physical process and represents a sequential simulation. Before the simulation system is running, all the entities are distributed to each logical process. The parallelism of the simulation system depends on the parallelism between logical processes. The performance of this parallel approach is greatly affected by the entity distribution scheme. For example, when the computing hotspots are assigned to one LP, the performance of the parallel simulation is almost the same as that of the serial simulation. And it is difficult to find a suitable entity distribution scheme when it comes to simulation with hotspots which migrate between LPs dynamically. Besides, we always use as many LPs as possible to improve parallelism, but this also brings greater communication and synchronization overhead. Focusing on these drawbacks of current simulation engines, we propose an approach which supports fine grain parallelism in one LP. Based on the traditional time management algorithms, our approach can process events of different entities in one LP in parallel with multi threads.