ROSS: a high-performance, low memory, modular time warp system

We introduce a new time warp system called ROSS: Rensselaer's Optimistic Simulation System. ROSS is an extremely modular kernel that is capable of achieving event rates as high as 1,250,000 events per second when simulating a wireless telephone network model (PCS) on a quad processor PC server. In a head-to-head comparison, we observe that ROSS out performs the Georgia Tech Time Warp (GTW) system on the same computing platform by up to 180%. ROSS only requires a small constant amount of memory buffers greater than the amount needed by the sequential simulation for a constant number of processors. The driving force behind these high-performance and low memory utilization results is the coupling of an efficient pointer-based implementation framework, Fujimoto's (1989) fast GVT algorithm for shared memory multiprocessors, reverse computation and the introduction of kernel processes (KPs). KPs lower fossil collection overheads by aggregating processed event lists. This aspect allows fossil collection to be done with greater frequency, thus lowering the overall memory necessary to sustain stable, efficient parallel execution.