Event List Management in Distributed Simulation

Efficient management of events lists is important in optimizing discrete event simulation performance. This is especially true in distributed simulation systems. The performance of simulators is directly dependent on the event list management operations such as insertion, deletion, and search. Several factors such as scheduling, checkpointing, and state management influence the organization of data structures to manage events efficiently in a distributed simulator. In this paper, we present a new organization for input event queues, called append-queues, for an optimistically synchronized parallel discrete-event simulator. Append-queues exploits the fact that events exchanged between the distributed simulators are generated in sequences with monotonically increasing time orders. A comparison of append-queues with an existing multi-list organization is developed that uses both analytical and experimental analysis to show the event management cost of different configurations. The comparison shows performance improvements ranging from 3% to 47% for the applications studied.