Estimating performance of large scale distributed simulation built on homogeneous hardware

Large scale distributed simulation should be well planned before the execution, since applying unnecessary hardware only wastes our time and money. On the other side, we need enough hardware to achieve an acceptable performance. Thus, it is considerable to estimate the performance of a large scale distributed simulation before the execution. Such an estimation also improves the efficiency of the applied hardware in many cases due to the optimization on the simulation algorithm and on the partition of the model. In this paper, we show our approaches to estimate the performance, especially the duration of execution, of a large scale distributed simulation system built on a large set of homogeneous hardware, using a small set of hardware of the same type. Our basic idea is to simulate a distributed simulation in a sequential way for a short time considering all the costs and benefits of the distribution. The results of our case study show that our approaches are able to provide meaningful estimations.