Hierarchical Composite Synchronization

This paper presents a hierarchical composite synchronization algorithm for parallel discrete-event simulation. The composite approach combines an asynchronous CMB-style channel scanning method with a synchronous window-based method to avoid pathological situations where neither synchronization algorithms would perform optimally. The hierarchical approach addresses the discrepancy in the communication and synchronization cost for shared-memory multiprocessor multicore machines and for distributed-memory machines. The paper describes a performance model for the hierarchical composite algorithm and proposes a method for predicting the runtime empirically using linear regression. Experiment results show that the model can predict the overall performance of the hierarchical composite algorithm. A significant performance improvement has been observed over different combinations of the traditional asynchronous and synchronous approaches used separately for distributed-memory machines and on shared-memory multiprocessor multicore machines.