The Simian Concept: Parallel Discrete Event Simulation with Interpreted Languages and Just-in-Time Compilation, Nandakishore Santhi, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Jason Liu. In Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2015), L. Yilmaz, W. K V. Chan, I. Moon, T. M. K. Roeder, C. Macal, and M. D. Rossetti, eds., December 2015. [paper]
abstractbibtex
We introduce Simian, a family of open-source Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) engines written using Lua and Python. Simian reaps the benefits of interpreted languages—ease of use, fast development time, enhanced readability and a high degree of portability on different platforms—and, through the optional use of Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, achieves high performance comparable with the state-of-the-art PDES engines implemented using compiled languages such as C or C++. This paper describes the main design concepts of Simian, and presents a benchmark performance study, comparing four Simian implementations (written in Python and Lua, with and without using JIT) against a traditionally compiled simulator, MiniSSF, written in C++. Our experiments show that Simian in Lua with JIT outperforms MiniSSF, sometimes by a factor of three under high computational workloads.
@INPROCEEDINGS{Santhi2015:simuan,
author={N. Santhi and S. Eidenbenz and J. Liu},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)},
title={The Simian Concept: Parallel Discrete Event Simulation with Interpreted Languages and Just-in-Time Compilation},
year={2015},
pages={3013-3024},
doi={10.1109/WSC.2015.7408405},
month={Dec},
}
author={N. Santhi and S. Eidenbenz and J. Liu},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)},
title={The Simian Concept: Parallel Discrete Event Simulation with Interpreted Languages and Just-in-Time Compilation},
year={2015},
pages={3013-3024},
doi={10.1109/WSC.2015.7408405},
month={Dec},
}