High Performance Clusters: A Promising Environment for Parallel Discrete Event Simulation

Parallel simulation techniques are promising for reducing the simulation time and for increasing the system size as well. Traditionally executed on state-of-the-art parallel machines, parallel simulation can now benet from the availability of high-performance clusters (HPC) based on commodity hardware. In this paper, we present our experiments with parallel simulations of large-scale communication networks on a Myrinet-based cluster. The model requires high performance communication as a large number of small messages are sent. The speedup results show that HPC can be a serious alternative to parallel machines even for high-demanding communication applications