A non-blocking priority queue for the pending event set

The large diffusion of shared-memory multi-core machines has impacted the way Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) engines are built. While they were originally conceived as data-partitioned platforms, where each thread is in charge of managing a subset of simulation objects, nowadays the trend is to shift towards share-everything settings. In this scenario, any thread can (in principle) take care of CPU-dispatching pending events bound to whichever simulation object, which helps to fully share the load across the available CPU-cores. Hence, a fundamental aspect to be tackled is to provide an efficient globally-shared pending events’ set from which multiple worker threads can concurrently extract events to be processed, and into which they can concurrently insert new produced events to be processed in the future. To cope with this aspect, we present the design and implementation of a concurrent non-blocking pending events’ set data structure, which can be seen as a variant of a classical calendar queue. Early experimental data collected with a synthetic stress test are reported, showing excellent scalability of our proposal on a machine equipped with 32 CPU-cores.