Just-In-Time Parallel Simulation, Christopher Hannon, Nandakishore Santhi, Stephan Eidenbenz, Jason Liu, and Dong Jin. In Proceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2018), December 2018. (To appear).
Abstract
Due to the evolution of programming languages, interpreted languages have gained widespread use in scientific and research computing. Interpreted languages excel at being portable, easy to use, and fast in prototyping than their ahead-of-time (AOT) counterparts, including C, C++, and Fortran. While traditionally considered as slow to execute, advancements in Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation techniques have significantly improved the execution speed of interpreted languages and in some cases outperformed AOT languages. In this paper, we explore some challenges and design strategies in developing a high performance parallel discrete event simulation engine, called Simian, written with interpreted languages with JIT capabilities, including Python, Lua, and Javascript. Our results show that Simian with JIT performs similarly to AOT simulators, such as MiniSSF and ROSS. We expect that with features like good performance, user-friendliness, and portability, the just-in-time parallel simulation will become a common choice for modeling and simulation in the near future.
Bibtex
@inproceedings{jit-parallel,
title = {Just-In-Time Parallel Simulation},
author = {Hannon, Christopher and Santhi, Nandakishore and Eidenbenz, Stephan and Liu, Jason and Jin, Dong},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2018)},
month = {December},
year = {2018}
}