Concurrent/parallel simulation of discrete event systems via event synchronization

By using the event synchronization scheme, we develop a new method for parallel simulation of many discrete event dynamic systems concurrently. Though a few concurrent simulation methods have been developed during the last several years, such as the well-known Standard Clock method, most of them are largely limited to Markovian systems. The main advantage of our method is its applicability to non-Markovian systems, For Markovian systems a comparison study on efficiency between our method and the Standard Clock method is done on Connection Machine CM-5. CM-5 is a parallel machine with both SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) and MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) architectures. The simulation results show that if event rates of Markovian systems do not differ by much then both methods are compatible but the Standard Clock method performs better in most cases. For Markovian systems with very different event rates, our method often yields better results. Most importantly, our simulation results also show that our method works as efficiently for non-Markovian systems as for Markovian systems.