WBSP: A Novel Synchronization Mechanism for Architecture Parallel Simulation

doi:10.1109/TC.2015.2439253

	WBSP: A Novel Synchronization Mechanism for Architecture Parallel Simulation
	Wu, Junmin 1; Zhu, Xiaodong 1; Li, Tao 2; Sui, Xiufeng 3
	2016-03-01
发表期刊	IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS
ISSN	0018-9340
卷号	65 期号:3 页码:992-1005
摘要	Parallelization is an efficient approach to accelerate multi-core, multi-processor and cluster architecture simulators. Nevertheless, frequent synchronization can significantly hinder the performance of a parallel simulator. A common practice in alleviating synchronization cost is to relax synchronization using lengthened synchronous steps. However, as a side effect, simulation accuracy deteriorates considerably. Through analyzing various factors contributing to the causality error in lax synchronization, we observe that a coherent speed across all nodes is critical to achieve high accuracy. To this end, we propose wall-clock based synchronization (WBSP), a novel mechanism that uses wall-clock time to maintain a coherent running speed across the different nodes by periodically synchronizing simulated clocks with the wall clock within each lax step. Our proposed method only results in a modest precision loss while achieving performance close to lax synchronization. We implement WBSP in a many-core parallel simulator and a cluster parallel simulator. Experimental results show that at a scale of 32-host threads, it improves the performance of the many-core simulator by 4.3 x on average with less than a 5.5 percent accuracy loss compared to the conservative mechanism. On the cluster simulator with 64 nodes, our proposed scheme achieves an 8.3 x speedup compared to the conservative mechanism while yielding only a 1.7 percent accuracy loss. Meanwhile, WBSP outperforms the recent proposed adaptive mechanism on simulations that exhibit heavy traffic.
关键词	Cluster system parallel simulation full system simulation lax synchronization
DOI	10.1109/TC.2015.2439253
收录类别	SCI
语种	英语
资助项目	National Natural Science Foundation of China[61272132] ; National Natural Science Foundation of China[61202062]
WOS研究方向	Computer Science ; Engineering
WOS类目	Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture ; Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
WOS记录号	WOS:000370729600026
出版者	IEEE COMPUTER SOC
引用统计	被引频次：1[WOS] [WOS记录] [WOS相关记录]
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.204/handle/2XEOYT63/8805
专题	中国科学院计算技术研究所期刊论文_英文
通讯作者	Wu, Junmin; Zhu, Xiaodong; Li, Tao; Sui, Xiufeng
作者单位	1.Univ Sci & Technol China, Suzhou Inst Adv Study, Suzhou, Jiangsu, Peoples R China 2.Univ Florida, Dept Elect & Comp Engn, Gainesville, FL USA 3.Chinese Acad Sci, Inst Comp Technol, Beijing, Peoples R China
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Wu, Junmin,Zhu, Xiaodong,Li, Tao,et al. WBSP: A Novel Synchronization Mechanism for Architecture Parallel Simulation[J]. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS,2016,65(3):992-1005.
APA	Wu, Junmin,Zhu, Xiaodong,Li, Tao,&Sui, Xiufeng.(2016).WBSP: A Novel Synchronization Mechanism for Architecture Parallel Simulation.IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS,65(3),992-1005.
MLA	Wu, Junmin,et al."WBSP: A Novel Synchronization Mechanism for Architecture Parallel Simulation".IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS 65.3(2016):992-1005.