Parallel simulation of the Sharks World problem

The authors describe the design of a Maisie program to simulate the Shark's World problem and present the timings for both sequential and parallel executions of the model. The sequential implementation of Maisie used a single event-list and a global simulation clock. The parallel implementation was executed on a multicomputer architecture using a space-time simulation algorithm. Experimental results indicate that reasonable speedups may be achieved for a relatively small number of creatures; further, the speedups increased linearly as the number of creatures in the system was increased. For a configuration with 2048 creatures, the parallel implementation with 32 nodes and 32 sectors was better by a factor of almost five over the best sequential implementation. The performance of the space-time algorithm depends on a number of factors, including frequency of checkpointing, time-length for which multiple incarnations of an entity are created, and the algorithm used to detect the time up to which the simulation has converged.<
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