Leveraging shared memory in the ross time warp simulator for complex network simulations

Scalability of parallel discrete-event simulation (PDES) systems is key to their use in modeling complex networks at high fidelity. In particular, intranode scalability is important due to the prevalence of many-core systems, but MPI communication between cores on the same node is known to have drawbacks (e.g., software overheads). We have extended the ROSS optimistic PDES framework to create memory pools shared by MPI processes on the same node in order to reduce on-node MPI overhead. We perform experiments to compare the performance of shared memory ROSS with pure MPI ROSS on two different systems. For the experiments, we use several models that exhibit a variety of characteristics to understand the conditions where shared memory can benefit the simulation. In general, higher remote event rates means that simulations are more likely to benefit from using shared memory, but this may also be due in part to improved rollback behavior.