Scalable RTI-based parallel simulation of networks

Federated simulation interfaces such as the high level architecture (HLA) were designed for interoperability, and as such are not traditionally associated with high-performance computing. We present results of a case study examining the use of federated simulations using runtime infrastructure (RTI) software to realize large-scale parallel network simulators. We examine the performance of two different federated network simulators, and describe RTI performance optimizations that were used to achieve efficient execution. We show that RTI-based parallel simulations can scale extremely well and achieve very high speedup. Our experiments yielded more than 80-fold scaled speedup in simulating large TCP/IP networks, demonstrating performance of up to 6 million simulated packet transmissions per second on a Linux cluster. Networks containing up to two million network nodes (routers and end systems) were simulated.