A Transputer Based Simulation of Colliding Pucks

The colliding pucks simulation is an application originally developed to benchmark the performance of the Time Warp method of parallel discrete event simulation. The application simulates the movements of pucks on a 2-dimensional frictionless surface. All puck collisions and the results of the collisions for a particular simulation run are recorded. This allows a post-processor to determine the positions of all pucks at any simulated point in time. Our Time Warp implementation of the colliding pucks simulation uses incremental state-saving and lazy cancellation in an attempt to minimize the overhead associated with state-saving and rollbacks. It is this overhead which limits the speedup of the simulation when implemented on a parallel system. The results presented in this paper were obtained using our colliding pucks simulation on a network of 21 transputers. It is shown that our distributed implementation of colliding pucks can achieve a signiicant speedup over a comparable sequential version of colliding pucks for a suuciently complex simulation.