Parallel Discrete Event Simulation with Erlang

TL;DR

ErlangTW is a middleware for parallel discrete event simulation using the Time Warp protocol, designed in Erlang to simplify development and support execution on multicore and distributed systems.

Contribution

This paper introduces ErlangTW, a novel parallel simulation middleware built in Erlang, making parallel simulation model development easier and adaptable to various architectures.

Findings

Preliminary performance results show ErlangTW scales on multicore and distributed systems.

ErlangTW simplifies the development of parallel simulation models.

ErlangTW supports execution on single-core, multicore, and distributed architectures.

Abstract

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is a widely used technique in which the state of the simulator is updated by events happening at discrete points in time (hence the name). DES is used to model and analyze many kinds of systems, including computer architectures, communication networks, street traffic, and others. Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) aims at improving the efficiency of DES by partitioning the simulation model across multiple processing elements, in order to enabling larger and/or more detailed studies to be carried out. The interest on PADS is increasing since the widespread availability of multicore processors and affordable high performance computing clusters. However, designing parallel simulation models requires considerable expertise, the result being that PADS techniques are not as widespread as they could be. In this paper we describe ErlangTW, a parallel simulation middleware based on the Time Warp synchronization protocol. ErlangTW is entirely written in Erlang, a concurrent, functional programming language specifically targeted at building distributed systems. We argue that writing parallel simulation models in Erlang is considerably easier than using conventional programming languages. Moreover, ErlangTW allows simulation models to be executed either on single-core, multicore and distributed computing architectures. We describe the design and prototype implementation of ErlangTW, and report some preliminary performance results on multicore and distributed architectures using the well known PHOLD benchmark.