Parallel logic simulation on distributed memory multiprocessors classification and evaluation of different approaches

A test environment is presented that allows for diierent methods of executing discrete event simulations in parallel to be evaluated in a uniform environment. A great variety of parallelizations have been proposed in the past. Up to now, however, an unbiased comparative evaluation of diierent approaches has been impossible because run-time measurements published in the literature have been obtained with diierent simulators on diierent multiprocessor systems and therefore cannot be compared. Our approach to an unbiased comparison of diierent parallelization methods is as follows: The variety of existing methods is structured by classifying them according to the way how the simulation task is subdivided into processes and how these processes synchronize. Thus a small number of fundamentally diierent approaches to distributed simulation can be identiied each of which comprises a whole class of parallel algorithms. As a basis for the testbed, one representative from each approach has been implemented. Thus a comparison of diierent approaches is possible while at the same time a library of functions is provided that allows further parallelizations to be implemented easily.