Development and Performance Analysis of a Simulation-Optimization Framework

Abstract. A Large Scale Simulation Optimization (LASSO) framework is be-ing developed by the authors. Linux clusters are the target platform for the framework, specifically cluster resources on the NSF TeraGrid. The framework is designed in a modular fashion that simplifies coupling with simulation model executables, allowing application of simulation optimization approaches across problem domains. In this paper the LASSO framework is coupled with a paral-lel groundwater transport simulation model. The performance of the LASSO framework is measured using a source history reconstruction problem and benchmarked against an existing MPI based implementation developed previ-ously. Performance results indicate that communication overhead in the LASSO framework is contributing significantly to wall times. The authors pur-pose and will conduct several performance optimizations designed to amelio-rate the problem.