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Carey Williamson Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan |
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The results show the performance advantages of parallel simulation over sequential simulation for ATM network simulation. Absolute speedups of 4-6 are attained on 16 processors on several ATM benchmark scenarios. However, the relative performance of the two parallel simulation kernels is dependent on the size of the ATM network, the number of traffic sources, and the traffic source types used in the simulation. For this type of problem the best single point performance is provided by the conservative kernel even on a single processor. Unfortunately, the conservative performance is susceptible to small changes in the modeling code, and provides the worst performance on some scenarios. The optimistic parallel simulation kernel provides more robust performance but is limited by the overheads of its implementation which make it approximately half the speed of the sequential kernel on one processor.
Dr. Williamson received his undergraduate education at the University of Saskatchewan and went on to a PhD at Stanford University. He has just returned from a sabbatical at the University of Calgary. The talk reports on collaborative work with Brian Unger and Xiao Zhonge from the University of Calgary, and John Cleary from the University of Waikato in New Zealand.