Semi-automatic parallelization of object-oriented simulations

Abstract

An approach is introduced for semi-automatic parallelization of object-oriented simulations. The basic idea is to prepare parallelization at the earliest possible stage in the life-cycle of the creation of new simulations (i.e. at modeling), thus minimizing causality conflicts at run-time. The object-oriented model of a simulation is enriched by hints, describing the estimated load and communication costs between major classes and objects. This helps to grasp the inherent parallelism of the model. Based on this additional information, a partitioning with minimal communication between partitions can be generated automatically. Remaining dependency-conflicts must be resolved at run-time. The GoSim [A. Stopper, GoSim, ein Ansatz zur Beschleunigung diskreter, objektorientierter, verteilter Simulationen, Ph.D. Thesis, Institute of Informatics, University Klagenfurt, 1997] simulation system is presented, which implements the described proposal and provides semi-automatic parallelization of large-scale and/or high-performance simulations. It provides a description language, a partitioning tool, a program-skeleton generator and a simulation engine. Some measurements prove the usability of the approach. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.