DISCS : An Object-Oriented Framework for Distributed Discrete-Event Simulation with the Standard Clock Method

Abstract

Parallel simulation has generally been ap plied in the form of partitioning a simulation model into small pieces and solving each piece on a separate processor of a parallel computer. This method is especially useful when the aim of the simulation is to ease the simulation of a significantly complex system by utilizing the capacity of a parallel machine or a distributed set of machines or processors. There has been significant amount of work in this area, which constitutes a majority of par allel/distributed simulation studies. There is another set of simulation problems, which takes on the task of simulating differ ent variants of the same system, usually for optimizing the system parameters or for find ing the best system among alternatives. The Standard Clock method addresses this latter set by running separate experiments on dif ferent processors. This paper describes the DISCS distributed simulation framework that runs over a network of personal comput ers and reports the results of experiments performed on the framework to measure the robustness and efficiency of the distributed standard clock algorithm.