HSK: A Hierarchical Parallel Simulation Kernel for Multicore Platform

The development of CPU has stepped into the era of multi-core. Due to lack of support on thread level, most of the simulation platform can not take full advantage of multicore. To fulfill this gap, we proposed a hierarchical parallel simulation kernel(HSK) model. The model has two layers. The first layer, named process kernel, was responsible for managing all thread kernels on second layer. The second layer is a group of thread kernels, which were responsible for scheduling and advancing logical processes. Each thread kernel was mapped onto an executing thread to advance simulation parallel. In addition, two algorithms were proposed to support high performance: (1) To improve the communication efficiency between threads, we proposed a pointer-based communication mechanism. By using buffers, synchronization between threads can be annihilated. (2) To eliminate redundant Lower Bound on Time Stamp(LBTS) computation and not to interrupt thread execution, we employ an approximate method to compute LBTS asynchronously. A proof of validity was presented. The execution performance of HSK was demonstrated by a series of simulation experiments with a modified phold model. The HSK can achieve good speedup for applications, especially with coarse-grained event.