Managing event traces for a web front-end to a parallel simulation

To enhance the widespread use of a parallel supply chain simulator, a web front-end that enables access at any time and from any location has been developed. The front-end provides the capability of model uploading, simulation runs initiation, simulation activities visualization, and simulation statistics collection. Visualizing the simulation activities requires the parallel simulator to record event traces to the file system for displaying purposes. To minimize the negative impact of the recording on the performance of parallel simulation, an event trace management algorithm, coupled with a buffering mechanism, is proposed. The approach was evaluated using six sample supply chain models. The results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of maintaining the same level of speedup when recording is performed (in the range of 2.5 to 3.0 on a 4-CPU shared memory system), as compared to runs without recording of event traces