Opimising the time wrap using the semantics of abstract data types

Abstract

The Time Warp mechanism for synchronising the execution of simulation components offers significant potential for achieving concurrency within distributed simulations. This mechanism takes advantage of the independence of most events in a simulation, enforcing only a partial ordering of events which allows many events to occur in an arbitrary order. There are many situations, however, where the partial order imposed by Time Warp is too restrictive, i.e., events are unnecessarily forced to occur in a specific order. This paper presents several example situations where Time Warp semantics can be relaxed, describes an approach based on abstract data types that can substantially improve performance, and outlines an implementation of this approach.