Distributed Simulation Considerations
John A. Hamilton, David A. Nash, Udo W. Pooch · 2020
This chapter focuses on some of the specific issues associated with simulation on distributed systems. Of particular concern are the handling of clocks, synchronous and asynchronous execution, and logical process simulation. The implementation of a simulation on a distributed system requires consideration of distribution issues early in the design process. The decomposition of a simulation for effective use by multiple processors is the key to the successful implementation of a distributed discrete event simulation system. A parallelizing compiler is used to find sequences of code in a sequential simulation that can be processed in parallel and on separate processors on a multiprocessor. Compilers continue to improve both in terms of ease of use and the efficiency with which they generate executable programs. The advantages of distributed language functions are that they avoid the deadlock problem and are transparent to the user. The technique of partitioning a distributed simulation into logical processes was developed by Fujimoto.