Distributed Simulation with a Transputer Version of the Time Warp Operating System

. Computer-based discrete event simulation is an important design and analysis tool in many different application areas. Traditionally, discrete event simulation has been performed in a sequential manner, but the size and complexity of many of today's simulation models demand a move towards parallel execution. Distributed simulation explores the potential parallelism inherent in many simulation applications by modelling events as time-stamped messages which are exchanged between the logical processes that represent the physical objects of the application. This paper describes the porting of the Time Warp Operating System (TWOS) onto a network of transputers. TWOS is a special purpose operating system, designed to support distributed simulation, originally developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper discusses the way in which particular features of the transputer make it suitable for distributed simulation and presents experimental results which demonstrate the speed-ups obtai..