Title:
Efficient Synchronized Data Distribution Management in Distributed Simulations

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Author(s)
Tacic, Ivan
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Advisor(s)
Fujimoto, Richard M.
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Abstract
Data distribution management (DDM) is a mechanism to interconnect data producers and data consumers in a distributed application. Data producers provide useful data to consumers in the form of messages. For each message produced, DDM determines the set of data consumers interested in receiving the message and delivers it to those consumers. We are particularly interested in DDM techniques for parallel and distributed discrete event simulations. Thus far, researchers have treated synchronization of events (i.e. time management) and DDM independent of each other. This research focuses on how to realize time managed DDM mechanisms. The main reason for time-managed DDM is to ensure that changes in the routing of messages from producers to consumers occur in a correct sequence. Also time managed DDM avoids non-determinism in the federation execution, which may result in non-repeatable executions. An optimistic approach to time managed DDM is proposed where one allows DDM events to be processed out of time stamp order, but a detection and recovery procedure is used to recover from such errors. These mechanisms are tailored to the semantics of the DDM operations to ensure an efficient realization. A correctness proof is presented to verify the algorithm correctly synchronizes DDM events. We have developed a fully distributed implementation of the algorithm within the framework of the Georgia Tech Federated Simulation Development Kit (FDK) software. A performance evaluation of the synchronized DDM mechanism has been completed in a loosely coupled distributed system consisting of a network of workstations connected over a local area network (LAN). We compare time-managed versus unsynchronized DDM for two applications that exercise different mobility patterns: one based on a military simulation and a second utilizing a synthetic workload. The experiments and analysis illustrate that synchronized DDM performance depends on several factors: the simulations model (e.g. lookahead), applications mobility patterns and the network hardware (e.g. size of network buffers). Under certain mobility patterns, time-managed DDM is as efficient as unsynchronized DDM. There are also mobility patterns where time-managed DDM overheads become significant, and we show how they can be reduced.
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Date Issued
2005-02-10
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7250804 bytes
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Text
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Dissertation
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