Sunday, November 30, 2014

The Fastest Simulation Software

One of my goals for 2014 was to perform the execution speed benchmarks described in my previous posts on a wide selection of mainstream simulation software packages. The software packages were compared by measuring the execution times for three basic activities:
  • executing a delay block
  • creating and destroying an entity
  • seizing and releasing a resource
Note that in previous posts, the third benchmark was the time to execute a "simple" block, which was taken to be one-half of the time to seize and release a resource. The new benchmark avoids this inference and presents the quantity that was actually measured.

Execution times were measured by counting the number of entities processed in 60 seconds measured with a stop watch. The posted results are the averages of three runs for each benchmark. All the runs were performed on the same laptop computer with a Second Generation ("Sandybridge") Core i5 processor running at 2.5 GHz. To make the results less machine specific, execution times were converted to clock cycles.

The following bar graph presents the results of the comparison.


Previous versions of this graph were labelled as "preliminary" to provide a chance for the vendors or other interested parties to improve the benchmark models for the individual software packages. Now that I have corresponded with most of the vendors and incorporated their suggestions, these results can be considered to be final for the specified version of each software package.

Revision 1: New results for Arena. Selecting the "Run > Run Control > Batch Run (No Animation)" option speeds up the benchmarks by a factor of ten. My thanks to Jon Santavy and Alexandre Ouellet for pointing this out.

Revision 2: New results for SIMUL8. Setting travel times between objects to zero resulted in a large improvement for the first and third benchmarks. The default setting for SIMUL8 is to assign a travel time in proportion to the distance between work centres, which increased the computational effort for these two benchmarks. The setting can be changed to zero travel time by selecting File > Preferences > Distance. My thanks to Sander Vermeulen for auditing and correcting the benchmark models.

Revision 3: New results for FlexSim. Execution speed was increased by approximately 10% by closing the “Model View (3D)” window during the run. The seize/release resource benchmark was also added to the result. After gaining more experience with FlexSim, it became clear that the Processor and Operator objects used for the first and third benchmarks are more complex objects than the simple seize, release, resource, and delay blocks that these two benchmarks are intended to evaluate. Since each object performs a series of actions to process an incoming entity, rather than just a single action, the results for the two benchmarks cannot be compared on a like-to-like basis with the other software packages. My thanks to Bill Nordgren for his help with the benchmarks.

Revision 4: New results for ExtendSim. Execution speeds were increased significantly by replacing the "Activity" blocks in Benchmarks 1 and 3 with "Workstation" blocks. The Workstation block is faster because it supports less functionality (pre-emption, shut-downs, and state statistics) than the Activity block, decreasing its overhead. It may be possible for ExtendSim users to increase execution speed further by creating a customized Activity block with any unneeded functionality stripped from the ModL code. My thanks to Peter Tag his guidance on ExtendSim.

Revision 5: New results for Simio. The entity creation and destruction benchmark was revised to use tokens instead of entities. All three benchmarks are now token-based. Tokens were used for the benchmark because they provide the same capabilities as the basic entity provided by some of the other simulation packages. The corresponding times for Simio's entity-based benchmarks are many times longer than the token-based ones. My thanks to David Sturrock preparing the new benchmark models.

Revision 6: New results for Arena. All three benchmark models were revised to use elements instead of modules to avoid unnecessary overhead. It is common practice for Arena modellers to avoid modules in large models where execution speed is an important factor. The module-based benchmark times are about 50% longer than the element-based times. My thanks to Alexandre Ouellet for preparing the new benchmark models.

Revision 7: Results for Simio 7.119. The latest release of Simio shows a significant improvement in execution speed for the seizing and releasing a resource (using tokens). Processing time was reduced from 21,000 clock cycles for release 7.114 to 4,300 clock cycles for release 7.119.

I should caution readers not to put very much importance on differences in execution speeds of less than a factor of two. Ease of use and suitability for the system to be modelled will always be the primary criteria for selecting simulation software. Execution speed is only important if it is a significant time saver for the analyst (impacting ease of use) or if it is required for the model to be tractable (impacting suitability for the system to be modelled). For some systems, even very slow software will be quite fast enough.

To put the execution times in perspective, consider the number of times an activity can be performed in one minute of processing time on a 2.5 GHz laptop computer. An activity requiring 150 clock cycles can be executed one billion times in one minute. One requiring 1,500 clock cycles can be executed 100 million times in one minute. Even one requiring 150,000 clock cycles can be executed one million times in one minute. In most cases, the fastest benchmark times measured by this exercise will be important only for very large models that require hundreds of millions of blocks to be executed over the course of each simulation run.

SLX holds the crown as the fastest of the simulation packages with times of 60, 110, and 230 clock cycles, however, it differs from the others in that it is strictly a programming language and lacks any drag & drop capabilities. JaamSim is the fastest of the simulation packages that include a drag & drop interface, with times of 240, 530, and 2,400 clock cycles. Arena, SIMUL8, AnyLogic, and Simio turn in solid results in the 1,000 - 10,000 clock cycle range. ExtendSim is significantly slower, with one benchmark time that exceeds 20,000 clock cycles. The results for FlexSim are not directly comparable to the other software packages and are provided for reference only (see the notes for Revision 3).