An Empirical Study of Energy Consumption in Distributed Simulations

Power and energy consumption are important concerns in the design of high performance and mobile computing systems, but have not been widely considered in the design of parallel and distributed simulations. The importance of these factors is discussed and metrics for power and energy overhead in parallel and distributed simulations are proposed. Factors affecting the energy consumed by synchronization algorithms and software architectures are examined. An experimental study is presented examining energy consumption of the well-known Chandy/Misra/Bryant algorithm executing on a peer-to-peer mobile computing platform and compared with a centralized client-server approach using the YAWNS synchronization algorithm. Initial results concerning queueing network simulations are also presented. The results of this study suggest that existing distributed simulation algorithms require a significant amount of additional energy compared to a sequential execution. Further, different synchronization algorithms can yield different energy consumption behaviors.