World-Wide Distributed Multiple Replications in Parallel for Quantitative Sequential Simulation

With the recent deployment of global experimental networking facilities, dozens of computer networks with large numbers of computers have become available for scientific studies. Multiple Replications in Parallel (MRIP) is a distributed scenario of sequential quantitative stochastic simulation which offers significant speedup of simulation if it is executed on multiple computers of a local area network. We report results of running MRIP simulations on PlanetLab, a global overlay network which can currently access more than a thousand computers in forty different countries round the globe. Our simulations were run using Akaroa2, a universal controller of quantitative discrete event simulation designed for automatic launching of MRIP-based experiments. Our experimental results provide strong evidence that global experimental networks, such as PlanetLab, can efficiently be used for quantitative simulation, without compromising speed and efficiency.