Section: Software and Platforms

Synapse model Erlang validator

Participant : Vincenzo Ciancaglini [contact] .

During the work on the Synapse protocol, we devised a mathematical model which would allow us to estimate performance indexes of an interconnected system without having to deploy a full-scale experiment. In order to be validated, however, the model results needed to be verified against some simulation results, run under simplified conditions, but with the highest possible number of nodes. To achieve this, a dedicated simulator has been developed using Erlang, a programming language dedicated to parallel and distributed applications, which allow for the simulation of extreme systems, with a number of nodes beyond one million, in the fastest way achievable, by fully exploiting the multicore architecture of modern machines. The simulator instantiates a lightweight thread for each node, and the communication are rendered by message passing between the different node threads, thus keeping the simulation conditions as close as possible to a real world behavior.