A distributed approach to queueing network simulation

Discrete simulation is a widely used technique for system performance evaluation. The conventional approach to discrete simulation (e.g., GPSS, Simscript) does not attempt to exploit the parallelism typically available in queueing network models. In this paper, a distributed approach to discrete simulation is presented. It involves the decomposition of a simulation into components and the synchronization of these components by message passing. This approach can result in the speedup of the total time to complete a given simulation if a network of processors is available. The architecture of a microcomputer network suitable for distributed simulation is described and some results concerning the distributed approach are presented.