Optimizing communication in time-warp simulators

In message passing environments, the message send time is dominated by overheads that are relatively independent of the message size. Therefore, fine grained applications (such as Time Warp simulators) suffer high overheads because of frequent communication. We investigate the optimization of the communication subsystem of Time Warp simulators using dynamic message aggregation. Under this scheme, Time Warp messages with the same destination LP, occurring in close temporal proximity are dynamically aggregated and sent as a single physical message. Several aggregation strategies that attempt to minimize the communication overhead without harming the progress of the simulation (because of messages being delayed) are developed. The performance of the strategies is evaluated for a network of workstations, and an SMP, using a number of applications that have different communication behavior.

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