Distributed simulation of spatially explicit ecological models

Large-scale ecological simulations are natural candidates for distributed discrete event simulation. In optimistic simulation of spatially explicit models, a difficult problem arises when individuals migrate between physical regions simulated by different logical processes. We present a solution to this problem that uses shared object states. Shared states allow for efficient communication between LPs and for early detection of canceled events. We briefly describe an optimistic simulation environment called EcoKit, which operates on top of the WarpKit implementation of Time Warp. Our experiments with this system on a shared memory multiprocessor show that EcoKit promises to scale well both with the number of processors and the number of individuals simulated