An approach for federating parallel simulators

This paper investigates issues concerning federations of sequential and/or parallel simulators. An approach is proposed for creating federated simulations by defining a global conceptual model of the entire simulation, and then mapping individual entities of the conceptual model to implementations within individual federates. Proxy entities are defined as a means for linking entities that are mapped to different federates. Using this approach, an implementation of a federation of optimistic simulators is examined. Issues concerning the adaptation of optimistic simulators to a federated system are discussed. The performance of the federated system utilizing runtime infrastructure (RTI) software executing on a shared memory multiprocessor (SMP) is compared with a native (non-federated) SMP-based optimistic parallel simulator. It is demonstrated that a well designed federated simulation system can yield performance comparable to a native, parallel simulation engine, but important implementation issues must be properly addressed.