Scalable RTI-Based Parallel Simulation of Networks

Federated simulation interfaces such as the High Level Architecture (HLA) were designed for interoperability, and as such are not traditionally associated with highperformance computing. In this paper, we present results of a case study examining the use of federated simulations using runtime infrastructure (RTI) software to realize large-scale parallel network simulators. We examine the performance of two different federated network simulators, and describe RTI performance optimizations that were used to achieve efficient execution. We show that RTI-based parallel simulations can scale extremely well and achieve very high speedup. Our experiments yielded more than 80-fold scaled speedup in simulating large TCP/IP networks, demonstrating performance of up to 6 million simulated packet transmissions per second on a Linux cluster. Networks containing up to two million network nodes (routers and end systems) were simulated.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: PADS
• Authors: Kalyan S. Perumalla, Alfred Park, Richard M. Fujimoto, George F. Riley
• Keywords: Federated Simulations, Modelling And Simulation, Network Simulators, PADS 2003, Parallel Network Simulators