Efficient Parallel Simulation of Networked Synchronous Discrete-Event Systems

We present Sitar, an open-source, general-purpose modeling framework consisting of a custom modeling language and a simulation kernel, designed for efficient parallel simulation of networked Synchronous Discrete-event Systems (SDES) in applications such as communication networks and computer systems design. A unique feature of Sitar is its two-phase, cycle-based simulation algorithm that allows an efficient, race-free parallel execution on shared-memory systems. This is achieved by imposing a mild restriction on the set of SDES that can be described within the framework. The modeling language is designed for describing complex, networked systems with a static interconnection structure. We demonstrate Sitar's modeling capability, performance and scalability through a detailed performance evaluation and a comparison against SystemC and SimPy. Our results show that Sitar's single-threaded performance is better than that of SimPy and comparable to that of SystemC, whereas a multi-threaded execution shows near-linear scaling for several benchmark configurations.