ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)最新文献

{"title":"The DEVStone Metric: Performance Analysis of DEVS Simulation Engines","authors":"Román Cárdenas, Kevin Henares, Patricia Arroba, J. L. Risco-Martín, Gabriel A. Wainer","doi":"10.1145/3543849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3543849","url":null,"abstract":"The DEVStone benchmark allows us to evaluate the performance of discrete-event simulators based on the Discrete Event System (DEVS) formalism. It provides model sets with different characteristics, enabling the analysis of specific issues of simulation engines. However, this heterogeneity hinders the comparison of the results among studies, as the results obtained on each research work depend on the chosen subset of DEVStone models. We define the DEVStone metric based on the DEVStone synthetic benchmark and provide a mechanism for specifying objective ratings for DEVS-based simulators. This metric corresponds to the average number of times that a simulator can execute a selection of 12 DEVStone models in 1 minute. The variety of the chosen models ensures that we measure different particularities provided by DEVStone. The proposed metric allows us to compare various simulators and to assess the impact of new features on their performance. We use the DEVStone metric to compare some popular DEVS-based simulators.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129197842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Drawing Random Floating-point Numbers from an Interval","authors":"F. Goualard","doi":"10.1145/3503512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3503512","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing a floating-point number uniformly at random from an interval [a, b) is usually performed by a location-scale transformation of some floating-point number drawn uniformly from [0, 1). Due to the weak properties of floating-point arithmetic, such a transformation cannot ensure respect of the bounds, uniformity or spatial equidistributivity. We investigate and quantify precisely these shortcomings while reviewing the actual implementations of the method in major programming languages and libraries, and we propose a simple algorithm to avoid these shortcomings without compromising performances.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114259255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Replicated Computational Results (RCR) Report for “A New Test for Hamming-Weight Dependencies”","authors":"Xiaoliang Wu, Dong Jin","doi":"10.1145/3527583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3527583","url":null,"abstract":"In the paper “A New Test for Hamming-Weight Dependencies”, Blackman and Vigna propose a new statistical test for pseudorandom number generators (PRNG). Compared with the state-of-the-art tests, the proposed test could find statistical bias in the Hamming weights of the output of the generator. The proposed test is evaluated by using generators in TestU01 [2]. The authors provide the C code used in the tests and the code successfully reproduced the results shown in the article.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127173527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Efficient Protocol Testing Under Temporal Uncertain Event Using Discrete-event Network Simulations","authors":"Minh Vu, Lisong Xu, Sebastian G. Elbaum, Wei Sun, Kevin Qiao","doi":"10.1145/3490028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3490028","url":null,"abstract":"Testing network protocol implementations is difficult mainly because of the temporal uncertain nature of network events. To evaluate the worst-case performance or detect the bugs of a network protocol implementation using network simulators, we need to systematically simulate the behavior of the network protocol under all possible cases of the temporal uncertain events, which is time consuming. The recently proposed Symbolic Execution based Interval Branching (SEIB) simulates a group of uncertain cases together in a single simulation branch and thus is more efficient than brute force testing. In this article, we argue that the efficiency of SEIB could be further significantly improved by eliminating unnecessary comparisons of the event timestamps. Specifically, we summarize and present three general types of unnecessary comparisons when SEIB is applied to a general network simulator, and then correspondingly propose three novel techniques to eliminate them. Our extensive simulations show that our techniques can improve the efficiency of SEIB by several orders of magnitude, such as from days to minutes.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126133315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to the Special Section on PADS 2020","authors":"P. Giabbanelli, C. Carothers","doi":"10.1145/3498363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3498363","url":null,"abstract":"This special section highlights four articles extended from papers that appeared in the 2020 ACM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS). It has been a tradition that ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) showcases some of the best papers from the SIGSIM flagship conference each year. This special section is edited by Philippe J. Giabbanelli and Christopher D. Carothers, who served as the conference program chairs and were responsible for the proceedings of the conference. Jason Liu was the general chair of the conference and helped with the initial organization of this special section. The articles appearing in this special section have also benefited from the help of Francesco Quaglia, who is the Editorin-Chief of ACM TOMACS, and assistance from the ACM publishing staff. The outcome of the selection process identified seven articles as possible candidates for this special section, as they were highly ranked based on reviews by the Technical Program Committee of SIGSIM-PADS 2020. Authors from each of the seven articles were invited to propose a substantial extension of their original conference papers to the editors of the special section. Accepted proposals were then given a deadline that allowed authors to perform the proposed work. To ensure quality, the extended manuscripts were peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers. All of the articles in this special section have undergone multiple rounds of reviews, so authors had the opportunity to carefully address the suggestions by the reviewers. Based on this process, the special section finally consists of four articles. The first article, entitled “Mechanisms for Precise Virtual Time Advancement in Network Emulation,” describes a new software modeling tool called Kronos that enables the precise instruction level tracking of process execution and control over the scheduling of containers. Kronos not only improves the mapping of runtime behaviors to the advancement of time but also enables the behavior of the emulation independent of the platform CPU resources that is hosting the emulation. This work demonstrates that Kronos is able to accurately control process execution at very small time-slices and in turn precisely model CPU instructions and traffic flows in large-scale networks. The original paper, from which this article is extended, won the 2020 SIGSIM-PADS Best Paper Award. The second article, entitled “Generating Fast Specialized Simulators for Stochastic Reaction Networks via Partial Evaluation,” presents a novel rule-based, partial evaluation approach that generates a specialized model-specific algorithm that yields a high-performance biochemical reaction network simulation. In particular, the evaluation conducted by the authors demonstrates that a combination of profile-guided optimization and partial evaluation techniques yields an impressive 16× performance improvement! The third article, entitled “A Scalable Quantum Key Distrib","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115540513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mechanisms for Precise Virtual Time Advancement in Network Emulation","authors":"Vignesh Babu, D. Nicol","doi":"10.1145/3478867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3478867","url":null,"abstract":"Network emulators enable rapid prototyping and testing of applications. In a typical emulation, the execution order and process execution burst lengths are managed by the host platform’s operating system, largely independent of the emulator. Timerbased mechanisms are typically used, but the imprecision of timer firings introduces imprecision in the advancement of time. This leads to statistical variation in behavior that is not due to the model. This article describes an open-source tool called Kronos, which provides a set of mechanisms for precise instruction-level tracking of process execution and control over execution order of containers, thus improving the mapping of executed behavior to advancement in time. This, and control of execution and placement of emulated processes in virtual time make the behavior of the emulation independent of the CPU resources of the platform that hosts the emulation. Under Kronos each process has its own virtual clock that is advanced based on a count of the number of ( times ) 86 assembly instructions executed by its children. Two types of instruction counting techniques are discussed: (1) hardware-assisted mechanisms that are transparent to the executing application and (2) binary instrumentation-assisted mechanisms that modify the executing binary. We analyze the overheads associated with each approach and experimentally demonstrate the impact of Kronos’ time advancement precision by comparing it against emulations that, like Kronos, are embedded in virtual time, but unlike Kronos rely on Linux timers to control virtual machines and measure their progress in virtual time. We present two useful applications where Kronos aids in generating high-fidelity emulation results at low hardware costs: (1) analyzing protocol performance and (2) enabling analysis of cyber physical control systems. We also discuss limitations associated with simple linear conversions between instruction counts and ascribed virtual time and develop and evaluate more accurate virtual time conversion models.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130592049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Generating Fast Specialized Simulators for Stochastic Reaction Networks via Partial Evaluation","authors":"Till Köster, Tom Warnke, A. Uhrmacher","doi":"10.1145/3485465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3485465","url":null,"abstract":"Domain-specific modeling languages allow a clear separation between simulation model and simulator and, thus, facilitate the development of simulation models and add to the credibility of simulation results. Partial evaluation provides an effective means for efficiently executing models defined in such languages. However, it also implies some challenges of its own. We illustrate this and solutions based on a simple domain-specific language for biochemical reaction networks as well as on the network representation of the established BioNetGen language. We implement different approaches adopting the same simulation algorithms: one generic simulator that parses models at runtime and one generator that produces a simulator specialized to a given model based on partial evaluation and code generation. For the purpose of better understanding, we additionally generate intermediate variants, where only some parts are partially evaluated. Akin to profile-guided optimization, we use dynamic execution of the model to further optimize the simulators. The performance of the approaches is carefully benchmarked using representative models of small to large biochemical reaction networks. The generic simulator achieves a performance similar to state-of-the-art simulators in the domain, whereas the specialized simulator outperforms established simulation tools with a speedup of more than an order of magnitude. Technical limitations in regard to the size of the generated code are discussed and overcome using a combination of link-time optimization and code separation. A detailed performance study is undertaken, investigating how and where partial evaluation has the largest effect.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129054475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Method Using Generative Adversarial Networks for Robustness Optimization","authors":"N. Feldkamp, Soeren Bergmann, Florian Conrad, S. Strassburger","doi":"10.1145/3503511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3503511","url":null,"abstract":"The evaluation of robustness is an important goal within simulation-based analysis, especially in production and logistics systems. Robustness refers to setting controllable factors of a system in such a way that variance in the uncontrollable factors (noise) has minimal effect on a given output. In this paper, we present an approach for optimizing robustness based on deep generative models, a special method of deep learning. We propose a method consisting of two Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate optimized experiment plans for the decision factors and the noise factors in a competitive, turn-based game. In a case study, the proposed method is tested and compared to traditional methods for robustness analysis including Taguchi method and Response Surface Method.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121241884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Scalable Quantum Key Distribution Network Testbed Using Parallel Discrete-Event Simulation","authors":"Xiaoliang Wu, Bo Zhang, Gong Chen, Dong Jin","doi":"10.1145/3490029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3490029","url":null,"abstract":"Quantum key distribution (QKD) has been promoted as a means for secure communications. Although QKD has been widely implemented in many urban fiber networks, the large-scale deployment of QKD remains challenging. Today, researchers extensively conduct simulation-based evaluations for their designs and applications of large-scale QKD networks for cost efficiency. However, the existing discrete-event simulators offer models for QKD hardware and protocols based on sequential event execution, which limits the scale of the experiments. In this work, we explore parallel simulation of QKD networks to address this issue. Our contributions lay in the exploration of QKD network characteristics to be leveraged for parallel simulation as well as the development of a parallel simulation framework for QKD networks. We also investigate three techniques to improve the simulation performance including (1) a ladder queue based event list, (2) memoization for computationally intensive quantum state transformation information, and (3) optimization of the network partition scheme for workload balance. The experimental results show that our parallel simulator is 10 times faster than a sequential simulator when simulating a 128-node QKD network. Our linear-regression-based network partition scheme can further accelerate the simulation experiments up to two times over using a randomized network partition scheme.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"64 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130398551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Workflow Architecture for Cloud-based Distributed Simulation","authors":"N. R. Chaudhry, A. Anagnostou, Simon J. E. Taylor","doi":"10.1145/3503510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3503510","url":null,"abstract":"Distributed Simulation has still to be adopted significantly by the wider simulation community. Reasons for this might be that distributed simulation applications are difficult to develop and access to multiple computing resources are required. Cloud computing offers low-cost on-demand computing resources. Developing applications that can use cloud computing can be also complex, particularly those that can run on different clouds. Cloud-based Distributed Simulation (CBDS) is potentially attractive, as it may solve the computing resources issue as well as other cloud benefits, such as convenient network access. However, as possibly shown by the lack of sustainable approaches in the literature, the combination of cloud and distributed simulation may be far too complex to develop a general approach. E-Infrastructures have emerged as large-scale distributed systems that support high-performance computing in various scientific fields. Workflow Management Systems (WMS) have been created to simplify the use of these e-Infrastructures. There are many examples of where both technologies have been extended to use cloud computing. This article therefore presents our investigation into the potential of using these technologies for CBDS in the above context and the WORkflow architecture for cLoud-based Distributed Simulation (WORLDS), our contribution to CBDS. We present an implementation of WORLDS using the CloudSME Simulation Platform that combines the WS-PGRADE/gUSE WMS with the CloudBroker Platform as a Service. The approach is demonstrated with a case study using an agent-based distributed simulation of an Emergency Medical Service in REPAST and the Portico HLA RTI on the Amazon EC2 cloud.","PeriodicalId":326454,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)","volume":"52 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126851179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}