An approach to study performance properties of distributed simulation

The authors present the results of an experimental performance study of distributed simulation of a particular queuing network using a minor variation of the NULL message based algorithm of Chandy and Misra. One major part of this study is to determine the effect of overhead on distributed simulation. The authors present a simple and novel approach to study the relationship between amount of overhead and performance. They define and measure certain refined notions of `ideal speed up ratio´-these ratios are more refined (as opposed to just the number of processors) in the sense that they capture the potentially achievable speed ups of distributed simulation more closely