Title:     JiST - An efficient, unifying approach 
             to simulation using virtual machines
Speaker:   Rimon Barr <barr@cs.cornell.edu>
Date/Time: Monday, 3 May 2004, 9am
Location:  5130 Upson

From physics to biology, from weather and stock predictions to
estimating the performance of a new processor design, people in many
avenues of science and industry increasingly depend on software
simulation. Consequently, discrete event simulators have been the
subject of much research: systems researchers have built many types
of simulation kernels and libraries, while the languages community
has designed numerous languages specifically for simulation. In this
talk, I will describe a new approach for constructing discrete event
simulators that leverages virtual machines and combines the benefits
of the traditional systems-based and language-based approaches to
simulator construction. 

JiST, for Java in Simulation Time, is a general-purpose simulation
engine that embodies this new technique. It embeds simulation
execution semantics directly into the Java virtual machine. The system
provides all the standard benefits that the modern Java runtime
affords. In addition, JiST is efficient, out-performing existing
highly optimized simulation runtimes, and inherently flexible, capable
of transparently performing cross-cutting program transformations and
optimizations. I will explain how the basic system works, discuss
various extensions, and also illustrate a practical application of
JiST through SWANS, a Scalable Wireless Ad hoc Network Simulator that
runs atop JiST.

Joint work with Zygmunt Haas and Robbert van Renesse.