ABSTRACT
Other chapters in this book discuss various aspects of dynamic systems modeling. The purpose of this chapter is to present an introduction to some of the contemporary innovations in the use of distributed computing techniques to support modeling. This is called distributed simulation and can be defined as the distribution of the execution of a single run of a simulation program across multiple processors (Fujimoto, 2000). The various motivations for this include: the reduction of the execution time of a single simulation run, the use of multiple computers to support the memory needs of the simulation when one computer cannot, and the linking of simulations sited in different locations (Fujimoto, 2003). A cursory examination of the many Winter Simulation Conferences (WSC) (www.informs-cs.org and www.acm.org/dl), the Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS) (www.acm.org/dl), and Simulation Interoperability Workshops (SIW) (www.sisostds.org) show the wide applications and issues of distributed simulation. By way of introduction, and to give focus to this work, we restrict our discussion to the use of distributed simulation in the field of modeling associated with the use of Commercial-off-theshelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs). CSPs are widely used in industry. In this chapter, we term the combination of distributed simulation and CSPs, CSP-based distributed simulation.
