``Sharing Event Data in Optimistically Scheduled Multicast Applications''
G. Yaun, D. Bauer, and C. D. Carothers
In Proceedings of the 2005 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC '05),
December 2005
ABSTRACT
A major consideration when designing high performance simulation
models is state size. Keeping the model state sizes small enhances
performance by using less memory, thereby increasing cache utilization
which leads to reduced model execution time. Assuming an otherwise
efficient simulation executive, the only remaining area for reducing
model size is within the events they create. The event population is
typically the most memory intensive region within a simulation
especially in the case of multi/broadcast like applications which tend
to schedule many events within the atomic processing of a single
event. To tackle the issue of excessive event memory consumption in
multicast applications, this paper introduces the idea of "shared
event data"q. Here, the read-only data section is shared for a
multicast event, which may then be delivered to several LPs. The
critical aspect to processing events with shared data is that the
simulation executive must ensure that the shared data is properly
maintained not destroyed prematurely. In this paper we present an
approach for sharing event data within optimistic simulation system
and demonstrate performance on a multicast benchmark application.
From our performance study, we report a 22% reduction in the data
cache miss rate, a processor utilization in excess of 80% and a
reduction in model memory consumption by a factor of 20