Commentary—Will Parallel Simulation Research Survive?

In his feature article, Fujimoto pointed out that the success of parallel simulation depends not only on the speedup that can be achieved through parallel simulation but also on the effort required to develop the parallel code. The general simulation community will only recognize parallel simulation technology if several practical simulation applications are found such that the total cost of the code development and code execution for parallel simulation is much less than the cost of sequential simulation. The sequential execution times of most examples listed in Table II in the feature article were less than two hours. It is difficult to justify parallel simulation as the right approach to follow if one needs to spend one additional day (or more) to develop parallel code in order to reduce a two hour execution time to several minutes. Most parallel simulation research focuses on reducing execution time of parallel simulation. Fujimoto proposed several approaches to address the parallel code development i...