Software diversity-based active replication as an approach for enhancing the performance of advanced simulation systems

Active replication has been widely explored to achieve fault tolerance and to improve system availability, especially in service oriented applications. In this paper we explore software diversity-based active replication in the context of advanced simulation systems, with the aim at improving the timeliness for the production of simulation output. Our proposal is framed by the High-Level-Architecture (HLA), namely a middleware based standard for simulation package interoperability, and results in the design and implementation of an Active Replication Management Layer (ARML) targeted to off-the-shelf SMP computing systems. This layer can be interposed in between each simulator instance and the underlying HLA middleware component, in order to support the execution of diversity-based active replicas of a same simulation package in a totally transparent manner. Beyond presenting the replication framework and the design/implementation of ARML, we also report the results of an experimental evaluation on a case study, quantifying the benefits from our proposal in terms of both simulation execution speed and performance guarantees vs tunable software parameters. (Free software releases of ARML can be found at the URL http://www.dis.uniromal.it/~quaglia/software/ARML) © World Scientific Publishing Company.