Case study in simulating PCS networks using time warp

Abstract

Some experiences in developing two PCS simulation models on a general purpose distributed simulation platform based on the Time Warp mechanism are described. These models use two widely employed approaches to simulating PCS networks. Design decisions that were made in mapping these models to the Time Warp executive are discussed, and the workloads resulting from these models in terms of factors such as communication and computation granularity are characterized. Then, performance measurements are presented for their execution on a network of workstation. These measurements indicate that the call-initiated model generally outperforms the portable initiated model, but is not able to capture phenomenon such as the 'busy line' effect.