Exploring Multi-Grained Parallelism in Compute-Intensive DEVS Simulations

Abstract

We propose a computing technique for efficient parallel simulation of compute-intensive DEVS models on the IBM Cell processor, combining multi-grained parallelism and various optimizations to speed up the event execution. Unlike most existing parallelization strategies, our approach explicitly exploits the massive fine-grained event-level parallelism inherent in the simulation process, while most of the logical processes are virtualized, making the achievable parallelism more deterministic and predictable. Together, the parallelization and optimization strategies produced promising experimental results, accelerating the simulation of a 3D environmental model by a factor of up to 33.06. The proposed methods can also be applied to other multicore and shared-memory architectures.