Parallel Simulation
Why PDES?
- simulation consumes enormous amounts of time on sequential machines.
- represents a problem domain that often contains substantial amounts of parallelism but surprisingly difficult to parallelize in practice.
In simulation of asynchronous systems, events are not synchronized by a global clock, but rather, occur at irregular time intervals. Events are executed concurrently at different points in simulated time. This requirements introduces synchronization problems that are the heart of the PDES problem.
If we extend the sequential simulation execution paradigm, it is crucial to select the smallest time-stamped event from the event list to be executed next to prevent simulating a system in which the future could affect the past. We call errors of this nature causality errors.