Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) on a cluster of workstations is a fine grained application where the communication performance can dictate the effiency of the simulation. The high performance Local/System Area Networks used in high-end clusters are capable of delivering data with high bandwidth and low latency. Unfortunately, the communication rate far out-paces the capabilities of workstation nodes to handle it (I/0 bus, memory bus, CPU resources). For this reason, many vendors are offering a programmable processor on the NIC to allow application specific optimization of the communication path. This invites a new implementation model for distributed applications where: (i) application specific communication optimizations can be implemented on the NIC; (ii) portions of the application that are most heavily communicating can be migrated to the NIC; (iii) some messages can be filtered out at the NIC without burdening the primary processor resources; and (iv) critical events are detected and handled early. The aim of our research is to investigate the utility of this model for PDES and to gain initial experiences in the implementation challenges and potential performance improvement. In this paper, we present our experiences with  Early Cancellation  --- an optimization for Time-Warp that cancels messages in place upon early discovery of a rollback. We believe that there is a large scope for additional optimizations using this model.
['Ranjit Noronha', 'Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh']
Early cancellation:an active NIC optimization for time-warp