Massively parallel SIMD simulation of discrete time stochastic Petri nets

Performance modeling using Petri nets is becoming increasingly popular due to their versatility. Simulation remains the only feasible method of solving Petri nets with generally distributed firing times. Previous work on parallel simulation of Petri nets mostly involved some restricted classes of timed Petri nets that have been simulated on MIMD machines. This paper proposes a synchronous algorithm for SIMD simulation of a general class of timed Petri nets with discrete transition firing times. Implementation on a MasPar MP-2 shows that good speedups are achievable and a parallel implementation can significantly outperform a sequential implementation using a workstation.