Cost/performance of a parallel computer simulator

This paper examines the cost/performance of simulating a hypothetical target parallel computer using a commercial host parallel computer. We address the question of whether parallel simulation is simply faster than sequential simulation, and whether it is also more cost-effective. To answer this, we develop a performance model of the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT), a system that simulates cache-coherent shared-memory machines on a message- passing Thinking Machines CM-5. The performance model uses Kruskal and Weiss's fork-join model to account for the effect of event processing time variability on WWT's conservative fixed-window simulation algorithm