SPADES: Solver for PArallel Discrete Event Simulation
README
SPADES: Solver for PArallel Discrete Event Simulation
SPADES (Solver for PArallel Discrete Event Simulation) is an open-source parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) package built on the AMReX library. Targeted at solving discrete event systems in parallel, this software package aims to be performance portable and scalable on heterogeneous computing architectures, e.g., graphic processing units (GPU). SPADES implements optimistic synchronization with rollback through an implementation of the Time Warp algorithm. An alternative conservative synchronization approach is also implemented using the Lower Bound on Incoming Time Stamp. In our implementation, logical processes are represented as cells in a grid and event messages are represented as particles. SPADES supports various parallel decomposition strategies, including the use of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and OpenMP threading. All major GPU architectures (e.g., Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) are supported through the use of performance portability functionalities implemented in AMReX. The SPADES software is released in NREL Software Record SWR-24-99 “SPADES (Scalable Parallel Discrete Events Simulation)”.
Getting Started
To compile and run SPADES, one needs a C++ compiler that supports the C++17 standard, and then execute:
$ git clone --recursive git@github.com:NREL/spades.git
$ cd Build
$ ./cmake.sh
$ ./spades example.inp
Dependencies
SPADES is built on the AMReX library.
Documentation
The full documentation for SPADES exists in the Docs directory; at present this is maintained inline using Sphinx and Doxygen. To build the documentation:
$ cd Build && cmake -DSPADES_ENABLE_DOCUMENTATION:BOOL=ON .. && cmake --build . -t docs
Contributing, reporting bugs, and requesting help
To report issues or bugs please create a new issue on GitHub.
We welcome contributions from the community in form of bug fixes, feature enhancements, documentation updates, etc. Please refer to the contributing guidelines for more information. All contributions are processed through pull-requests on GitHub. Please refer to the style guide as a reference for the best practices currently used to develop SPADES.
Please acknowledge as a publication co-author any developer that has significantly contributed to implementing or improving specific capability that was used for that publication.
Funding
This work was authored by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program at NREL. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. A portion of the research was performed using computational resources sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and located at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.