Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Parallelization is an efficient approach to accelerate multi-core, multi-processor and cluster architecture simulators. Nevertheless, frequent synchronization can significantly hinder the performance of a parallel simulator. A common practice in alleviating synchronization cost is to relax synchronization using lengthened synchronous steps. However, as a side effect, simulation accuracy deteriorates considerably. Through analyzing various factors contributing to the causality error in lax synchronization, we observe that a coherent speed across all nodes is critical to achieve high accuracy. To this end, we propose Wall-Clock Based Synchronization (WBSP), a novel mechanism that uses wall-clock time to maintain a coherent running speed across the different nodes by periodically synchronizing simulated clocks with the wall clock within each lax step. Our proposed method only results in a modest precision loss while achieving performance close to lax synchronization. We implement WBSP in a many-core parallel simulator and a cluster parallel simulator. Experimental results show that at a scale of 32-host threads, it improves the performance of the many-core simulator by 4.3x on average with less than a 5.5% accuracy loss compared to the conservative mechanism. On the cluster simulator with 64 nodes, our proposed scheme achieves an 8.3x speedup compared to the conservative mechanism while yielding only a 1.7% accuracy loss. Meanwhile, WBSP outperforms the recent proposed adaptive mechanism on simulations that exhibit heavy traffic. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2016 | 10.1109/TC.2015.2439253 | IEEE Trans. Computers |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
cluster system,full system simulation,lax synchronization,parallel simulation | Architecture,Parallel simulation,Synchronization,Computer science,Parallel computing,Synchronizing,Real-time computing,Thread (computing),Speedup | Journal |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
PP | 99 | 0018-9340 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
1 | 0.34 | 27 |
Authors | ||
4 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junmin Wu | 1 | 45 | 6.37 |
| Xingquan Zhu | 2 | 3086 | 181.95 |
| Tiemin Li | 3 | 45 | 7.58 |
| Xiufeng Sui | 4 | 27 | 5.83 |