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Table of Contents
Performance evaluation of a self-clustering heuristic for adaptive PADS
Authors
Abstract
Parallel And Distributed Simulation (PADS) is a well known modeling paradigm that allows efficient implementation of large simulation models as a collection of interacting entities, called Simulated Entities (SEs). SEs can then be assigned to independent execution units for parallel execution, if possible. Allocating SEs to execution units is one of the most challenging problems in PADS: ideally, highly interacting SEs should be placed on the same execution unit so that all communications are local; however, placing too many SEs on the same processor might degrade performance. Furthermore, many simulation models exhibit non-uniform computation and communication patterns among components, that might change during execution at unpredictable times. In this paper we propose a clustering heuristic that exploits communication locality, with the aim to reduce the communication cost experienced by the PADS during the execution. The heuristic adapts automatically to changing interaction patterns by migrating SEs, and can do so without any user-visible modification of the simulation model; there are, however, some parameters that can be used to tune the heuristic. We perform a large set of computational experiments to assess the effectiveness of the heuristic on a real-world scenario, with the aim of guiding the users in selecting optimal values of the heuristic parameters.
Keywords
- Parallel and Distributed Simulation, Discrete Event Simulation, Model Partitioning, Clustering Heuristics.
Status
- Submitted for review to the 2025 29th International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2025).
Resources
- The LUNES source code is part of the ARTÌS software distribution
- Raw data obtained by the experiments used to produce the figures: download