Performance Comparable Implementation Design of Synchronization Protocols for Distributed Simulation

A large number of variations for the efficient implementation of distributed simulation protocols on shared as well as distributed memory parallel machines have been proposed in the literature. They are roughly divided into two families: conservative protocols (originated by Chandy and Misra) and optimistic protocols (originated by Jefferson). Their attained simulation performances as reported in the literature, however, cannot be compared directly, due to different implementation strategies, different optimizations and different software environments as well as parallel hardware platforms. Our own implementations of the protocols and some optimized variations on a distributed memory machine (iPSC/860) and on a shared memory machine (Balance B21) revealed the same performance incomparability dilemma. Now we designed a new version of a distributed simulation protocol that has intermediate characteristics with respect to the two main families, and is expected to provide better performanc..