Advanced Simulation Techniques
In recent decades, amazing progress has been achieved in simulation technology. Nevertheless, simulation of complex systems still quite often suffers considerably from the limits imposed by practical applicability in terms of simulation runtimes and/or memory requirements.
Several projects funded by the German Research Foundation DFG allowed the work group Communication Systems to do research on innovative techniques of dynamic distribution (partitioning) of simulation runs to several CPUs or several computers. As primary application area we chose simulations of mobile ad hoc networks. Here, innovative combinations of state-of-the-art mechanisms and some new techniques turned out to provide excellent results. As an example: With commercial off-the-shelf multi-core computers, an almost optimum (i.e. linear) speedup has been reached for real-world oriented simulation scenarios. Future activities will focus on the extension of cloning techniques which allow for a dedicated analysis of alternative simulation runs without repeating common parts of the simulation over and over again. This approach results in both drastically reduced run times and drastically reduced memory requirements.
Cloning techniques also promise to be extremely relevant for the in-depth handling of simultaneous events and for simulations with deliberately imposed inaccuracies in event timing. In the areas addressed here, our group co-operates closely with researchers at the Florida International University.
For further information please contact: perfeng@cs.uni-bonn.de