Investigation of out-of-core parallel discrete-event simulation

In large-scale discrete-event simulations the size of a computer's physical memory limits the size of system to be simulated. Demand paging policies that support virtual memory are generally ineffective. Use of parallel processors to execute the simulation compounds the problems, as memory can be tied down due to synchronization needs. We show that by taking more direct control of disks it is possible to break through the memory bottleneck, without significantly increasing overall execution time. We model one approach to conducting out-of-core parallel simulation, identifying relationships between execution, memory, and I/O costs that admit good performance.