A performance study of the RPE mechanism for PDES

We present the latest implementation of our Remote Process Execution (RPE) mechanism for parallel discrete-event simulation (PDES), along with results of an empirical study of its performance. RPE is an optimistic time warp based mechanism, which allows logical processes on one processor to execute remotely on another when the former is lagging behind in the computation. The advantage is that processors running too far ahead need neither wait, nor run excessively optimistically: they can instead do some useful work for processors which are falling behind. The disadvantage of course, is the cost associated with running processes remotely. The experiments we have run so far show that performance can be significantly enhanced through RPE under the right conditions. In particular, as expected, the site of computation grains was found to be of primary importance. Though our tests were ran with relatively few processors, we suggest a few simple modifications which should allow the scheme to work well for large numbers of computing elements