An assessment of the ModSim/TWOS parallel simulation environment

The Time Warp Operating System (TWOS) has been the focus of significant research in parallel, discrete-event simulation (PDES). A new language, ModSim, has been developed for use in conjunction with TWOS. The coupling of ModSim and TWOS is an attempt to address the development of large-scale, complex, discrete-event simulation models for parallel execution. The approach, simply stated, is to provide a high-level simulation-language that embodies well-known software engineering principles combined with a high-performance parallel execution environment. The inherent difficulty with this approach is the mapping of the simulation application to the parallel run-time environment. To use TWOS, Time Warp applications are currently developed in C and must be tailored according to a set of constraints and conventions. C/TWOS applications are carefully developed using explicit calls to the Time Warp primitives; thus, the mapping of application to parallel run-time environment is done by the application developer. The disadvantage to this approach is the questionable scalability to larger software efforts; the obvious advantage is the degree of control over managing the efficient execution of the application. The ModSim/TWOS system provides an automatic mapping from a ModSim application to an equivalent C/TWOS application. The major flaw with the ModSim/TWOS system is it currently exists is that there is no compiler support for mapping a ModSim application into an efficient C/TWOS application. Moreover, the ModSim language as currently defined does not provide explicit hooks into the Time Warp Operating System and hence the developer is unable to tailor a ModSim application in the same fashion that a C application can be tailored. Without sufficient compiler support, there is a mismatch between ModSim's object-oriented, process-based execution model and the Time Warp execution model