Using zpl to develop a parallel chaos router simulator

This paper reports on our experience in writing a parallel version of a chaos router simulator using the new data driven parallel language ZPL. The simulator is a large program that tests the capabilities of ZPL. The (parallel) ZPL program is compared with the existing serial implementation on two very different architectures: a 16-processor Intel Paragon and a cluster of eight Alpha work stations. On the Paragon, the simulator performs best when simulating medium- to large-sized routers, and on the Alpha cluster, it performs best when simulating large routers. Thus a user can choose the parallel platform best suited to the router size.