Commentary - The Silver Bullet

When addressing acceptance of a parallel computing technology by the general simulation community, the issue of performance cannot be overlooked and is difficult to overexaggerate. So, how does this relate to Fujimoto's paper? Fujimoto identifies “easing the amount of work and expertise required to parallelize simulation applications” as his primary point of departure and focuses on four silver bullets. “Alleviating concerns about performance” is not among them. Yet, if there is a silver bullet, this is it. What I mean by “alleviating performance concerns” is this: if an environment existed where simulationists could develop parallel simulations with automated support for difficult tasks such as synchronization and communication, and the acceptability of the performance of the resulting simulation execution did not hinge on the performance of the automated portions, then performance concerns have been alleviated. Ideally, the performance of the entire simulation would be acceptable, but programmers can be...