Design of high level modelling / high performance simulation environments

Abstract

Advances in massively parallel platforms are increasing the prospects for high performance discrete event simulation. Still the difficulty in parallel programming persists and there is increasing demand for high level support for building discrete event models to execute on such platforms. We present a parallel DEVS-based (Discrete Event System Specification) simulation environment that can execute on distributed memory multicomputer systems with benchmarking results of a class of high resolution, large scale ecosystem models. Underlying the environment is a parallel container class library for hiding the details of message passing technology while providing high level abstractions for hierarchical, modular DEVS models. The C++ implementation working on the Thinking Machines CM-5 demonstrates that the desire for high level modeling support need not be irreconcilable with sustained high performance.