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Transparent Speculative Parallelization of Discrete Event Simulation Applications Using Global Variables

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Abstract

Parallelizing (compute-intensive) discrete event simulation (DES) applications is a classical approach for speeding up their execution and for making very large/complex simulation models tractable. This has been historically achieved via parallel DES (PDES) techniques, which are based on partitioning the simulation model into distinct simulation objects (somehow resembling objects in classical object-oriented programming), whose states are disjoint, which are executed concurrently and rely on explicit event-exchange (or event-scheduling) primitives as the means to support mutual dependencies and notification of their state updates. With this approach, the application developer is necessarily forced to reason about state separation across the objects, thus being not allowed to rely on shared information, such as global variables, within the application code. This implicitly leads to the shift of the user-exposed programming model to one where sequential-style global variable accesses within the application code are not allowed. In this article we remove this limitation by providing support for managing global variables in the context of DES code developed in ANSI-C, which gets automatically parallelized. Particularly, we focus on speculative (also termed optimistic) PDES systems that run on top of multi-core machines, where simulation objects can concurrently process their events with no guarantee of causal consistency and actual violations of causality rules are recovered through rollback/recovery schemes. In compliance with the nature of speculative processing, in our proposal global variables are transparently mapped to multi-versions, so as to avoid any form of safety predicate verification upon their updates. Consistency is ensured via the introduction of a new rollback/recovery scheme based on detecting global variables’ reads on non-correct versions. At the same time, efficiency in the execution is guaranteed by managing multi-version variables’ lists via non-blocking algorithms. Furthermore, the whole approach is fully transparent, being it based on automatized instrumentation of the application software (particularly ELF objects). Hence the programmer is exposed to the classical (and easy to code) sequential-style programming scheme while accessing any global variable. An experimental assessment of our proposal, based on a suite of case study applications, run on top of an off-the-shelf Linux machine equipped with 32 CPU-cores and 64 GB of RAM, is also presented.

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Notes

  1. An anti-event is an exact copy of the corresponding event, or of its digest, except for a single-bit value.

  2. The only limitation to unbounded speculation is represented by storage constraints for keeping the speculatively processed/produced data records [25].

  3. Figures are drawn with data taken from http://www.top500.org as of March 2014.

  4. Thread-local storage data rely on segment registers to identify data positioning in memory. However, thread-local storage is out of the scope of our proposal, due to its non-global nature.

  5. To check if the space is up, a counter of available free nodes is kept as well in shared memory, which is managed via an atomic decrement operation.

  6. generate_mark can of course return two equal values when the counter overflows, but this situation can happen after a significant wall-clock-time is elapsed, so we consider it to be statistically non-significant for the ABA problem.

  7. All the samples reported in the experimental study result as the average over 5 observations collected in different runs and with different seeds for pseudo-random generation.

  8. Clearly, these synchronization dynamics are mixed with—hence additional to—those already induced via the simulation of the passage of vehicles across different SOBJs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIAG, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Alessandro Pellegrini, Francesco Quaglia & Roberto Vitali

  2. ECE Department, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Sebastiano Peluso

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  1. Alessandro Pellegrini
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  2. Sebastiano Peluso
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  3. Francesco Quaglia
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Correspondence to Francesco Quaglia.

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Pellegrini, A., Peluso, S., Quaglia, F. et al. Transparent Speculative Parallelization of Discrete Event Simulation Applications Using Global Variables. Int J Parallel Prog 44, 1200–1247 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-016-0429-2

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