Distributed discrete event simulation. Final report

The presentation given here is restricted to discrete event simulation. The complexity of and time required for many present and potential discrete simulations exceeds the reasonable capacity of most present serial computers. The desire, then, is to implement the simulations on a parallel machine. However, certain problems arise in an effort to program the simulation on a parallel machine. In one category of methods deadlock care arise and some method is required to either detect deadlock and recover from it or to avoid deadlock through information passing. In the second category of methods, potentially incorrect simulations are allowed to proceed. If the situation is later determined to be incorrect, recovery from the error must be initiated. In either case, computation and information passing are required which would not be required in a serial implementation. The net effect is that the parallel simulation may not be much better than a serial simulation. In an effort to determine alternate approaches, important papers in the area were reviewed. As a part of that review process, each of the papers was summarized. The summary of each paper is presented in this report in the hopes that those doing future work in the area will be able to gain insight that might not otherwise be available, and to aid in deciding which papers would be most beneficial to pursue in more detail. The papers are broken down into categories and then by author. Conclusions reached after examining the papers and other material, such as direct talks with an author, are presented in the last section. Also presented there are some ideas that surfaced late in the research effort. These promise to be of some benefit in limiting information which must be passed between processes and in better understanding the structure of a distributed simulation. Pursuit of these ideas seems appropriate