SIMA: an environment for parallel discrete-event simulation

Parallelism can significantly reduce the execution time of a simulation program. However, language support is needed to handle the complexities involved so that the underlying parallel mechanisms become transparent to the users. This paper presents a simulation environment called SIMA which addresses such issues. SIMA is an experimental environment for parallel discrete-event simulation in which a simulation model can be specified by the provided primitives and be executed on a shared memory multiprocessor. The parallel mechanisms of SIMA are totally transparent to users. This property makes usage of SIMA very convenient. Users can have the benefit of faster execution on a parallel computer without requiring knowledge about parallel processing. The base language is C and the interfaces are library routines and input arguments. The interfaces facilitate both parallel and sequential simulation. Several experiments indicate that SIMA has a satisfactory performance. Speedups of over 10 for many cases have been achieved using 15 processors