research-article

Virtual time III: unification of conservative and optimistic synchronization in parallel discrete event simulation

Authors:

David R. Jefferson,

Peter D. Barnes, Jr.Authors Info & Claims

WSC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Winter Simulation Conference

Article No.: 55, Pages 1 - 12

Published: 03 December 2017 Publication History

Abstract

There has long been a divide in synchronization approaches for parallel discrete event simulation, between conservative methods requiring lookahead and optimistic methods requiring rollback. These are usually seen as dichotomous, so that a model writer must make an early, static design decision between them. An optimistic simulator does not need lookahead information but is unable to take advantage of it even if it were available, whereas a conservative simulator may perform poorly or even deadlock without good lookahead information. Here we introduce unified virtual time (UVT) synchronization which provides the advantages of both conservative and optimistic synchronization dynamically for all models. Conservative synchronization becomes an accelerator for optimistic synchronization. When lookahead information is available the simulation will execute conservatively. Otherwise it will execute optimistically. In this paper we present UVT, argue for its correctness, and show adaptations of Time Warp, YAWNS, and Null Messages which cooperatively synchronize a single simulation.

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Cited By

Eker AArafa YBadawy ASanthi NEidenbenz SPonomarev DDiallo STolk AGiabbanelli P(2021)Load-Aware Dynamic Time Synchronization in Parallel Discrete Event SimulationProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3437959.3459249(95-105)Online publication date: 21-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3437959.3459249

Recommendations

Virtual Time III, Part 2: Combining Conservative and Optimistic Synchronization
This is Part 2 of a trio of works intended to provide a unifying framework in which conservative and optimistic synchronization for parallel discrete event simulations can be freely and transparently combined in the same logical process on an event-by-...
Global Virtual Time and distributed synchronization
PADS '95: Proceedings of the ninth workshop on Parallel and distributed simulation
Global Virtual Time (GVT) is the fundamental synchronization concept in optimistic simulations. It is defined as the earliest time tag within the set of unprocessed pending events in distributed simulation. A number of techniques for determining GVT ...
Virtual Time III, Part 1: Unified Virtual Time Synchronization for Parallel Discrete Event Simulation
Algorithms for synchronization of parallel discrete event simulation have historically been divided between conservative methods that require lookahead but not rollback, and optimistic methods that require rollback but not lookahead. In this paper we ...

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cover image ACM Conferences

WSC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Winter Simulation Conference

December 2017

4389 pages

ISBN:9781538634271

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SIGSIM: ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 03 December 2017

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WSC '17

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SIGSIM

WSC '17: Winter Simulation Conference

December 3 - 6, 2017

Nevada, Las Vegas

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Cited By

Eker AArafa YBadawy ASanthi NEidenbenz SPonomarev DDiallo STolk AGiabbanelli P(2021)Load-Aware Dynamic Time Synchronization in Parallel Discrete Event SimulationProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3437959.3459249(95-105)Online publication date: 21-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3437959.3459249

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