A Network Simulation System with Multiple PCs and Its Performance Evaluation

This paper investigates the performance of network simulations using a PC cluster with PBS (Portable Batch System), where the cluster consists of conventional PCs with multiple CPU cores. We focus on the execution time of network simulator ns-2. This paper also evaluates and compares the performance of a PC cluster, which is commercially available. Through simulation experiments, this paper shows the cluster using conventional PCs can achieve the performance comparable to the PC cluster of the commercial version. However the improvement becomes saturated due to the overhead of the job scheduling, if the execution time of a simulation is relatively small. In the environment where simulations produce large files stored in a shared disc, the execution time become large due to the bottleneck of the shared disc and the network bandwidth. Tuning of the simulation system, for example using local discs, is needed