Reference: Saraiya, N. P. AIDE: A Distributed Environment for Design and Simulation. June, 1986.
Abstract: AIDE is an environment that provides facilities for the hierarchical specification and simulation of systems. In addition, a user of AIDE can distribute a simulation over a network of computers. Achievable concurrency in a distributed simulation depends on the functional characteristics of the system being simulated and on the ability of the simulator to exploit its knowledge of these. AIDE can use the information contained in the structural and behavioral specification of a system to increase concurrency and decrease synchronization costs during distributed simulation. Performance analyses of the AIDE distributed simulation algorithm for a simulated multiprocessor architecture indicate that (1) the disparity between communication costs and event-processing costs and (2) load imbalance can significantly limit speedup when concurrency is available. The distributed aspects of the AIDE environment are implemented through an extension of the underlying object-oriented programming system (FLAVORS) to multiple machines.
Notes: Working Paper 25 pages.