This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Porras, J. Articles by Harju, J. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Analyzing the Effect of Distribution to the Simulation on a Network of Workstations

Lappeenranta University of Technology Lappeenranta, Finland

Jouni Ikonen

Lappeenranta University of Technology Lappeenranta, Finland

Jarmo Harju

Tampere University of Technology Tampere, Finland

In this paper, the effect of communication networks to the distributed simulation has been studied. A cellular network application is simulated on a net work of workstations, where an ordinary 10 Mbps Ethernet LAN has been used as the communication network. The effect of distribution is analyzed by using the well known concept of critical path analy sis, which requires event traces from real simula tions and information about event processing times as well as about their mutual relationships. In order to capture the effect of conservative synchronization, the event traces are collected from parallel simula tions instead of sequential. By using event traces and execution times, critical paths are calculated for different numbers of workstations. The use of differ ent configurations reveals the effect of distribution, as well as the scalability of the problem in the dis tributed environment. The critical path analysis re veals that the cellular network application is quite suitable for distributed simulation when conserva tive synchronization is used. Good approximations for the execution time can be achieved if the problem is suitably partitioned into different workstations.

Key Words: Conservative simulation • distrib uted simulation • workstation networks • critical path analysis • network delay • processing time • cellular network simulation

SIMULATION, Vol. 72, No. 5, 313-319 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/003754979907200505


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?