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Performance Study of a Minimalistic Simulator on XSEDE Massively Parallel Systems

Published: 13 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Scalable Simulation Framework (SSF), a parallel simulation application programming interface (API) for large-scale discrete-event models, has been widely adopted in many areas. This paper presents a simplified and yet more streamlined implementation, called MiniSSF. MiniSSF maintains the core design concept of SSF, while removing some of the complex but rarely used features, for sake of efficiency. It also introduces several new features that can greatly simplify model development efforts and/or improve the simulator's performance. More specifically, an automated compiler-based source-code translation scheme has been adopted in MiniSSF to enable scalable process-oriented simulation using handcrafted threads. A hierarchical hybrid synchronization algorithm has been incorporated in the simulator to improve parallel performance. Also, a new set of platform-independent API functions have been added for developing simulation models to be executed transparently on different parallel computing platforms. In this paper, we report performance results from experiments on different XSEDE platforms to assess the performance and scalability of MiniSSF. It is shown that the simulator can achieve superior performance. The simulator can adapt its synchronization according to the model's computation and communication demands, as well as the underlying parallel platform. The results also suggest that more automatic adaptation and fine-grained performance tuning is necessary for handling more complex large-scale simulation scenarios.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
XSEDE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment
July 2014
445 pages
ISBN:9781450328937
DOI:10.1145/2616498
  • General Chair:
  • Scott Lathrop,
  • Program Chair:
  • Jay Alameda
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

  • NSF: National Science Foundation
  • Drexel University
  • Indiana University: Indiana University

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 July 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Discrete event simulation
  2. model development
  3. parallel simulation

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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XSEDE '14

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XSEDE '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 80 of 120 submissions, 67%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 129 of 190 submissions, 68%

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  • (2020)Simulus: Easy Breezy Simulation in Python2020 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)10.1109/WSC48552.2020.9383886(2329-2340)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2020
  • (2018)Just-in-time parallel simulationProceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference10.5555/3320516.3320602(640-651)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2018
  • (2016)Some Properties of Events Executed in Discrete-Event Simulation ModelsProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/2901378.2901400(165-176)Online publication date: 15-May-2016
  • (2015)The simian conceptProceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference10.5555/2888619.2888968(3013-3024)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2015
  • (2015)The Simian concept: Parallel Discrete Event Simulation with interpreted languages and just-in-time compilation2015 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)10.1109/WSC.2015.7408405(3013-3024)Online publication date: Dec-2015
  • (2014)A simulation and emulation study of SDN-based multipath routing for fat-tree data center networksProceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference10.5555/2693848.2694235(3072-3083)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2014
  • (2014)A simulation and emulation study of SDN-based multipath routing for fat-tree data center networksProceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference 201410.1109/WSC.2014.7020145(3072-3083)Online publication date: Dec-2014

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