CS457 - System Performance Evaluation - Winter 2010

Lecture 16a - Discrete Event Simulation

This page provides pointers to additional material on Discrete Event Simulation.

General Material

The Single Server, Single Queue (1S/1Q) Simulation Example

• A different description of a simulation program for 1S/1Q. (written by Prof. J. W. Wong)

  This description differs from what we did in class primarily in that it creates data summaries as it goes along, rather than producing a log file that is analysed later.

  • The reason against making a log is that log files grow big, which not much of an issue in an era of big disks.
  • The reason for building on-line summaries is that you can then visualize the progress of the simulation in real-time, which
    • is sometimes a benefit because you can see early if something is going wrong, and
    • sometimes not a benefit because aborting some runs because something is going wrong is contrary to good data analysis practice.
  • My suggestion is
    • While debugging have on-line summaries and logs because you want to get through debugging as quickly as possible.
    • While running experiments turn off the on-line summaries and control all your runs by a single shell script while you take some well-deserved time off. (Remember that your analysis should, as much as possible, be run from the same shell script with you not looking on.)
  • The first few sections of this have a different treatment of the same example.
• A time-line of a small part of a 1S/1Q run.

Other Simulation Examples

• A description of a few simulation examples similar to those we saw in class. (written by Prof. J. W. Wong)
• A description of the simulation examples we did in class.

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