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An efficient approach to collaborative simulation of variable structure systems on multi-core machines

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Abstract

Complex variable-structure systems (CVSSs) are a common type of complex systems that exhibit changes both at structural and behavior levels. Simulations of CVSSs challenge current collaborative execution methods with increasingly big and complex models. The emergence of multi-core paradigm presents an exciting opportunity to address such challenge, so an advanced parallel simulator under multi-core environments is proposed. The simulator: (1) provides thread simulation kernels and five kinds of management services to support dynamic model structure flexibly; (2) can explore both inherent and dynamic parallelism among models based on interaction relations, and employ the multi-thread paradigm to gain good speedup; (3) adopts an efficient dynamic load-balancing method, which can migrate models among cores with very low cost and support dynamic core allocation on demand, to address evident load-imbalance problems brought by variable-structure. The experiments show that structure changes can be supported while up to 23 % performance increase can be gained.

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Acknowledgments

This work is financially supported by National Key Lab in Intelligent Manufacturing System Technology of Complex Product and the National 863 Plan (2015AA042101), China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Chen Yang

  2. Beijing Simulation Center, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Peng Chi, Ting Yu Lin, Bo Hu Li & Xudong Chai

  3. School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Xiao Song

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  1. Chen Yang
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  2. Peng Chi
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  3. Xiao Song
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Correspondence to Chen Yang.

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Yang, C., Chi, P., Song, X. et al. An efficient approach to collaborative simulation of variable structure systems on multi-core machines. Cluster Comput 19, 29–46 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-015-0498-9

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