Simulation of Queuing Systems on a Highly Parallel Computer System

The purpose of this research was to implement the simulation of specific queuing systems on the Encore Multimax computer system. The environment partitioning approach to distributed simulation was used to implement parallel simulations of three benchmark queuing models to show performance improvement. The execution times obtained for the queuing systems were better with environment partitioning than without. However, this only occurred when the objects to implement the simulation were tightly coupled and were not hiding a lot of information. Object oriented techniques were not completely applicable because the time spent in message passing between processors was large compared to the time spent in a processor's local computation. While speedups of up to 2.0 were obtained, this is far smaller than prior simulation studies have suggested are possible for a computer with faster inter-processor communication. Thus, the Multimax was not a suitable machine for distributed simulation employing object oriented design and environment partitioning.