Going Through Rough Times: from Non-Equilibrium Surface Growth to Algorithmic Scalability

G. Korniss, M.A. Novotny, P.A. Rikvold, H. Guclu, Z. Toroczkai
2001 Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings  
Efficient and faithful parallel simulation of large asynchronous systems is a challenging computational problem. It requires using the concept of local simulated times and a synchronization scheme. We study the scalability of massively parallel algorithms for discrete-event simulations which employ conservative synchronization to enforce causality. We do this by looking at the simulated time horizon as a complex evolving system, and we identify its universal characteristics. We find that the
more » ... e horizon for the conservative parallel discrete-event simulation scheme exhibits Kardar-Parisi-Zhang-like kinetic roughening. This implies that the algorithm is asymptotically scalable in the sense that the average progress rate of the simulation approaches a non-zero constant. It also implies, however, that there are diverging memory requirements associated with such schemes.
doi:10.1557/proc-701-t10.10.1 fatcat:rn7cbyhgdjehpktiw4hsgo3qme