Optimistic Simulations of Physical Systems using Reverse Computation

Abstract

Efficient computer simulation of complex physical phenomena has long been challenging due to their multi-physics and multi-scale nature. In contrast to traditional time-stepped execution methods, we describe an approach using optimistic parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) and reverse computation techniques to execute plasma physics codes. We show that reverse computation-based optimistic parallel execution can significantly reduce the execution time of an example plasma simulation without requiring a significant amount of additional memory compared to conservative execution techniques. We describe an application-level reverse computation technique that is efficient and suitable for complex scientific simulations.