Practical Distributed Implementation of Very Large Scale Petri Net Simulations

Rafiev, A; Morris, J; Xia, F; Yakovlev, A; Naylor, M; Moore, S; Thomas, D; Bragg, G; Vousden, M; Brown, A

doi:10.1007/978-3-662-65303-6_6

Practical Distributed Implementation of Very Large Scale Petri Net Simulations

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ashur Rafiev, Dr Jordan Morris, Dr Fei Xia, Professor Alex Yakovlev

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Abstract

With the continued increase of size and complexity of contemporary digital systems, there is a growing need for models of large size and high complexity, as well as methods of analyzing such models. This paper presents a method for simulating large-scale concurrent Petri net models using parallel distributed hardware platforms. By using POETS architecture, our method allows the mapping of concurrent Petri net executions onto 49,152 parallel processing hardware threads to achieve orders of magnitude (45 to 220 times) improvements of simulation speed, compared to conventional simulation methods using single processor systems. The presented method employs techniques including Petri net model partitioning, the use of max-step and locally interleaving semantics, and the fair firing of transitions.