A transputer based simulation of colliding pucks

The goal of a colliding puck simulator is to predict the movements of pucks on a frictionless, 2-dimensional surface bounded by cushions. When implemented as a parallel discrete event simulation, a colliding puck simulator requires designers to address all of the fundamental issues associated with parallel simulation. For this reason, colliding puck simulations may be used to benchmark the performance of parallel discrete event simulators. Our transputer based implementation of a colliding puck simulator uses the time warp approach to parallel discrete event simulation. Through the use of incremental state-saving and lazy cancellation, the overhead associated with checkpointing and rollbacks is minimized. It is this overhead which limits the speedup of the simulation when implemented on a parallel system. Our results indicate that a significant parallel speedup is possible for a sufficiently complex system of pucks.