Title :
An important factor for optimistic protocol on distributed systems: granularity
Author :
Choi, Eunmi ; Moon Jung Chung
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI, USA
Abstract :
Grain size, the amount of computations between communication points, is a quantity to be tuned appropriately depending on the characteristics of the underlying parallel and distributed machines, application problems, and simulation protocols. As target machines for optimistic protocol, the architectural characteristics of a cluster of DEC Alpha workstations are compared to the MasPar MP-2´s in view of parallel logic simulation. We study the effects of varying grain size on several performance metrics when more than one logical processes are assigned to a physical processor on distributed systems. We obtain analytic formulas for the total number of simulation cycles and the total execution time, and find the optimal grain sizes for several benchmark circuits when the number of processors varies. Our experimental results show that the grain size greatly affects the performance of parallel logic simulation on distributed systems, and the effects vary depending on the machine independent factors
Keywords :
DEC computers; circuit analysis computing; discrete event simulation; distributed processing; logic CAD; parallel processing; performance evaluation; DEC Alpha workstations; MasPar; application problems; benchmark circuits; computations; discrete event simulation; distributed machines; distributed systems; grain size; granularity; optimistic protocol; parallel logic simulation; parallel machines; performance metrics; simulation protocols; total execution time; Analytical models; Circuit simulation; Computational modeling; Concurrent computing; Distributed computing; Grain size; Logic; Measurement; Protocols; Workstations;
Conference_Titel :
Simulation Conference Proceedings, 1995. Winter
Conference_Location :
Arlington, VA
Print_ISBN :
0-78033018-8
DOI :
10.1109/WSC.1995.478839
