Coordinator-master-worker model for efficient large scale network simulation

Ben Romdhanne, Bilel; Nikaein, Navid; Bonnet, Christian
SIMUTOOLS 2013, 6th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques, March 5-7, 2013, Cannes, France

In this work, we propose a coordinator-master-worker (CMW) model for medium to extra-large scale network simulation. The model supports distributed and parallel simulation for a
heterogeneous computing node architecture with both multicore CPUs and GPUs. The model aims at maximizing the hardware usage rate while reducing the overall management
overhead. In the CMW model, the coordinator is the top-level simulation CPU process that performs an initial partitioning of the simulation into multiple instances and is responsible for load balancing and synchronization services among all the active masters. The master is also a CPU process and provides event scheduling, synchronization, and communication services to the workers. It manages workers operating potentially on different computing resources
within the same shared memory context and communicates with the coordinator and others masters through the messages passing interface. The worker is the elementary actor
of CMW model that performs the simulation routines and interacts with the input and output data, and can be a CPU or a GPU thread. Compared to existing master-worker models, the CMW is natively parallel and GPU compliant, and can be extended to support additional computing resources. The performance gain of the model is evaluated through different
benchmarking scenarios using low-cost publicly available GPU platforms. The results have been shown that the speedup up to 3000 times can be achieved compared to a sequential
execution and up to 6 times compared to a mono-GPU MW-based simulation. The hardware activities rate of the CMW services for both CPU and GPU are analyzed in detail.


Type:
Conférence
City:
Cannes
Date:
2013-03-05
Department:
Systèmes de Communication
Eurecom Ref:
4012
Copyright:
© ACM, 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in SIMUTOOLS 2013, 6th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques, March 5-7, 2013, Cannes, France

PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/4012