Time management in a service-oriented architecture for distributed simulation on the grid

A Service-Oriented Architecture is essentially a collection of independent services with well-defined interfaces that can be accessed without knowledge of their implementation. The architecture is widely used in Grid computing to achieve resource virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and service (resource) sharing. As the Grid has shown its potential as a suitable environment for simulation and modeling, a Service-Oriented Architecture for Distributed Simulation on the Grid (SOAr-DSGrid) was proposed. Like other simulation systems, time management is a crucial part of the whole system. It manages the logical time and guarantees that the whole simulation system is causally correct. This paper describes the implementation of distributed time management in SOAr-DSGrid. The time management makes use of the simulation topology information to reduce constraints on time advancement between simulation components. Various experiments conducted on a cluster demonstrate that a fully distributed time management system has better scalability and efficiency than the centralized version.