Scaling an Optimistic Parallel Simulation of Large-scale Interconnection Networks
Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) 2005
Publication Type: Paper
Repository URL: wintersim05
Abstract
Parallel computers today are designed with larger number of
processors than ever before, connected by large scale
Interconnection Networks. Communication is the key to achieving
high performance on such machines, making the study of
Interconnection Networks important. Parallel simulations of
Interconnection Networks present a unique problem characterized by
fine-grained computation and strong dependence among events. The
absence of large lookaheads makes it unsuitable to use a
conservative simulation. Using an optimistic Parallel Discrete
Event Simulation allows us to extract reasonable parallelism from
this simulation. In this paper we present BigNetSim, an
Interconnection Network simulator. We analyze its performance and
present techniques related to enhancing performance and scaling it
to a large number of processors on different artificial traffic
patterns and real application logs. Inspite of the overheads of a
parallel optimistic simulation, we have achieved a breakeven with
sequential simulation at four processors and demonstrate perfect
scaling to 128 processors.
TextRef
Nilesh Choudhury, Yogesh Mehta, Terry L. Wilmarth, Eric J. Bohm, and
Laxmikant V. Kale, "Scaling an Optimistic Parallel Simulation of Large-scale
Interconnection Networks", Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference, 2005.
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