Parallel and Distributed Simulation from Many Cores to the Public Cloud (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper reviews parallel and distributed simulation techniques in the context of many-core architectures and cloud computing, proposing a multi-agent system approach to enhance adaptivity, usability, and efficiency in dynamic, unreliable environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-agent system framework for simulation that enables adaptive entity migration, improving usability and performance on modern many-core and cloud platforms.

Findings

Multi-agent systems enable adaptive simulation techniques.

Migration of simulated entities reduces communication costs.

Framework supports simulations on unreliable cloud services.

Abstract

In this tutorial paper, we will firstly review some basic simulation concepts and then introduce the parallel and distributed simulation techniques in view of some new challenges of today and tomorrow. More in particular, in the last years there has been a wide diffusion of many cores architectures and we can expect this trend to continue. On the other hand, the success of cloud computing is strongly promoting the everything as a service paradigm. Is parallel and distributed simulation ready for these new challenges? The current approaches present many limitations in terms of usability and adaptivity: there is a strong need for new evaluation metrics and for revising the currently implemented mechanisms. In the last part of the paper, we propose a new approach based on multi-agent systems for the simulation of complex systems. It is possible to implement advanced techniques such as the migration of simulated entities in order to build mechanisms that are both adaptive and very easy to use. Adaptive mechanisms are able to significantly reduce the communication cost in the parallel/distributed architectures, to implement load-balance techniques and to cope with execution environments that are both variable and dynamic. Finally, such mechanisms will be used to build simulations on top of unreliable cloud services.