Local Time Warp: An Implementation and Performance Analysis

The local time warp (LTW) model was one of the novel approaches to distributed simulation presented in early 90s. While several similar schemes had emerged afterwards, no implementation and performance analysis of LTW were offered. This paper provides an implementation and performance analysis of the Local Time Warp model on a Beowulf Cluster using Message Passing Interface (MPI). Cluster computing matches well with the Local Time Warp model due to its partitioning of the simulation entities and assigning them to clusters of processors. This paper presents a distributed simulation engine called BG-LTW which is a clustered-based implementation of the model. Further, the implementation features and its performance are provided. The obtained results suggest that for large-scale simulations local time warp outperforms its global counterpart.