High Performance Network Simulation Partition Method In Heterogeneous Computing Environment

Network simulation is widely recognized as an essential tool and platform to study thenetwork behavior, evaluate the network protocols and anal analyze network algorithms. Withthe rapid development of computer networks, the size of topology for research grows to avery large scale, and yet amount of computation time required to perform large-scale networksimulation is prohibitive. One effective way to address this problem is to parallelize anddistribute the simulation to a number of different machines, so that each machine can share aportion of the workload. One of the main problems facing the users of a parallel anddistributed simulation is how to partition the network simulation task among the computingresources available, because good solutions of load balance are critical to achieving speedups.The main problem of distributed network simulation is how to assign the networksimulation task reasonably so as to realize the load balance for each compute machine in thedistributed network simulation environment. And this problem consists of two respects. Theone is the load balance for route computing simulation, and the other is the load balance fornetwork simulation including routing computing simulation and packet forwardingsimulation.This paper firstly introduces the concepts and technologies of network simulation,distributed network simulation and network simulation in heterogeneous computingenvironment. And then the framework of partition for network simulation task inheterogeneous computing environment is present. In this framework, Firstly, throughbenchmark experiments, the computation ability and routing simulation ability of eachsimulation machine are measured in the heterogeneous computing environment.Then, to solve the problem of load balance for route computing simulation task, anon-linear partition for network routing simulation task, named NLP, was proposed.Experiments indicate that, compared to traditional uniform partition method and linearpartition method, this method can effectively realize the load balance for route computingsimulation task and reduce routing computing running time in heterogeneous computingenvironment.At last, to reduce the running time of network simulation in heterogeneous computingenvironment, a network simulation task partition method, named LBPHCE, is put forward.Based on the computation ability of each simulation machine, the network simulation task isinitially partitioned to meet the load balance of packet forwarding simulation, and thenaccording to the routing computation ability, the scale of each partition is fine-tuned to satisfythe balance of the routing computing simulation, meanwhile the load balance of packetforwarding simulation is guaranteed. Experiments based on PDNS indicate that compared totraditional uniform partition method and linear partition method, LBPHCE can effectivelyreduce the network simulation running time and improve the performance of networksimulation in heterogeneous computing environment.