Method for benchmarking single board computers for building a mini supercomputer for simulation of telecommunication systems

Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) with the conservative synchronization method can be efficiently used for the performance analysis of telecommunication systems because of their good lookahead properties. For PDES, a cost effective execution platform may be built by using single board computers (SBCs), which offer relatively high computation capacity compared to their price or power consumption and especially to the space they take up. A benchmarking method is proposed and its operation is demonstrated by benchmarking six different SBCs, namely Banana Pi, Beaglebone Black, Cubieboard2, Odroid-U3+, Radxa Rock Lite and Raspberry Pi Model B+. Their benchmarking results are compared to find out which one should be used for building a mini supercomputer for parallel discrete-event simulation of telecommunication systems. The SBCs are also used to build a heterogeneous cluster and the performance of the cluster is tested, too.