Language Based State Saving Extensions for Optimistic Parallel Simulation.

F. Gomes, B. Unger and J. Cleary. Proceedings of the 1996 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC'96), Coronado, California.

Abstract: One of the greatest challenges in making optimistic synchronization techniques such as Time Warp practical tools is making state saving efficient and easy to use. State saving is necessary so that when optimistic execution is found to be out of order, rollback can be used to recover an earlier execution state. Previous work has shown that the most robust and efficient technique for saving state is to incrementally save copies of small parts of the state at the point that they are modified. Unfortunately, this requires significant programmer intervention to insert additional code.

In this paper, C++ language extensions for transparent incremental state saving are presented. Operator overloading and type parameterization are used to incrementally save basic data types. Building on this, two new type-specifiers, "recover" and "nonrecover" are described. They allow a single declaration to specify, for example, that all the member variables of a class are to be state saved, and for all the resulting state saving calls to be automatically generated. Issues, including how these specifiers interact with class inheritance and function declarations are examined and solved.

Download paper