An empirical study of conservative scheduling

It is well known that the critical path provides an absolute lower bound on the execution time of a conservative parallel discrete event simulation. It stands to reason that optimal execution time can only be achieved by immediately executing each event on the critical path. However, dynamically identifying the critical event is difficult, if not impossible. We examine several heuristics that might help to determine the critical event, and conduct a performance study to determine the effectiveness of using these heuristics for preferential scheduling.