Sharing Event Data In Optimistically Scheduled Multicast Applications

A major consideration when designing high performance simulation models is state size. Keeping the model state sizes small enhances performance by using less memory, thereby increasing cache utilization and reducing model execution time. The only remaining area for reducing model size is within the events they create. The event population is typically the most memory intensive region within a simulation especially in the case of multi/broadcast like applications which tend to schedule many events within the atomic processing of a single event. This paper introduces the idea of shared event data within an optimistic simulation system. Here, the read-only data section is shared for a multicast event, which may then be delivered to several LPs. From our performance study, we report a 22% reduction in the data cache miss rate, a processor utilization in excess of 80% and a reduction in model memory consumption by a factor of 20.