This paper describes the Time Warp Operating System, under development for three years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Caltech Mark III Hypercube multi-processor. Its primary goal is concurrent execution of large, irregular discrete event simulations at maximum speed. It also supports any other distributed applications that are synchronized by virtual time. The Time Warp Operating System includes a complete implementation of the Time Warp mechanism, and is a substantial departure from conventional operating systems in that it performs synchronization by a general distributed process rollback mechanism. The use of general rollback forces a rethinking of many aspects of operating system design, including programming interface, scheduling, message routing and queueing, storage management, flow control, and commitment. In this paper we review the mechanics of Time Warp, describe the TWOS operating system, show how to construct simulations in object-oriented form to run under TWOS, and offer a qualitative comparison of Time Warp to the Chandy-Misra method of distributed simulation. We also include details of two benchmark simulations and preliminary measurements of time-to-completion, speedup, rollback rate, and antimessage rate, all as functions of the number of processors used.
The Time Warp Operating System (TWOS) is a special-purpose operating system designed to support parallel discrete event simulation.It has been under experimental development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for four years, and runs primarily on the JPL/Caltech Mark III Hypercube, although it has been ported to several other systems. Its main distinction is that it incorporates a full implementation of the Time Warp mechanism, which is based on the unusual synchronization primitives of process rollback and messageantimessage annihilation.In this paper we discuss the status of the TWOS project at JPL, and present preliminary data from some of the performance experiments we have conducted on a Pool Balls benchmark, along with our analysis of them.
This paper describes the Time Warp Operating System, under development for three years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Caltech Mark III Hypercube multiprocessor. Its primary goal is concurrent execution of large, irregular discrete event simulations at maximum speed. It also supports any other distributed applications that are synchronized by virtual time.The Time Warp Operating System includes a complete implementation of the Time Warp mechanism, and is a substantial departure from conventional operating systems in that it performs synchronization by a general distributed process rollback mechanism. The use of general rollback forces a rethinking of many aspects of operating system design, including programming interface, scheduling, message routing and queueing, storage management, flow control, and commitment.In this paper we review the mechanics of Time Warp, describe the TWOS operating system, show how to construct simulations in object-oriented form to run under TWOS, and offer a qualitative comparison of Time Warp to the Chandy-Misra method of distributed simulation. We also include details of two benchmark simulations and preliminary measurements of time-tocompletion, speedup, rollback rate, and antimessage rate, all as functions of the number of processors used.
This paper analyzes the performance of a discrete‐event combat simulation executed on a parallel processor under control of the Time Warp Operating System. Time Warp is in a class of distributed simulation methods called Optimistic methods which have proven to be useful over a wide range of simulations. The combat simulation used for this performance study, called STB88, is a division‐corps model incorporating a number of different types of computations. The speed‐up for three versions of this model on the Caltech/JPL Mark III Hypercube and the BBN Butterfly parallel processors was measured relative to an efficient sequential execution of the same model on the same hardware. The results indicate that STB88 version 1 achieves a speed‐up of 28.6 on 60 Mark III processors, while STB88 version 2 achieves a speed‐up of 36.8 on 100 Butterfly processors. Version 3 of STB88 achieved a speed‐up of 38.5 on 128 Mark III processors. The versions differed only in their interface to Time Warp. On the Butterfly, the sequential execution completed in 2 hours, while the 100 processor execution completed in 3.2 minutes.
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