PORTS: a parallel, optimistic, real-time simulator

This paper describes issues concerning the design of an optimistic parallel discrete event simulation system that executes in environments that impose real-time constraints on the simulator's execution. Two key problems must be addressed by such a system. First the timing characteristics of the parallel simulator must be sufficiently predictable to allow one to guarantee that real-time deadlines for completing simulation computations will be met. Second, the optimistic computation must be able to interact with its surrounding environment with as little latency as possible, necessitating rapid commitment of I/O operations. To address the first question, we show that optimistic simulators that never send incorrect messages (sometimes called “aggressive-no-risk” simulators) provide sufficient predictability to allow traditional schedulability analysis techniques commonly used in real-time systems to be applied. We show that incremental state saving techniques introduce sufficient unpredictability that they are not well-suited for real-time environments. We observe that the traditional “lowest timestamp first” scheduling policy used in many optimistic parallel simulation systems is an optimal (in the real-time sense) scheduling algorithm when event timestamps and real-time deadlines are the same. Finally, to address the question for rapid commitment of I/O operations, we utilize a continuous GVT computation scheme for shared-memory multiprocessors where a new value of GVT is computed after processing each event in the simulation. These ideas are incorporated in a parallel, optimistic, real-time simulation system called PORTS. Initial performance measurements of the shared-memory based PORTS system executing on a Kendall Square Research multiprocessor are presented. Initial performance results are encouraging, demonstrating that PORTS achieves performance approaching that of a conventional Time Warp system for the benchmark programs that were tested.