ECE284, Fall 05 Curt Schurgers
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Design Project 1: Parallel simulation with PARSEC
Introduction
When designing new network protocols, algorithms or communication systems, engineers often rely on
simulations to test out their ideas and evaluate their performance before moving to implementation. For
distributed systems, these simulation tools have to incorporate the ability to mimic parallel execution of
code on multiple devices, a notion of time and mechanisms for message passing and synchronization.
For this project, we will be using PARSEC, a discrete event parallel programming language developed at
UCLA. This language can be viewed as an extension of regular C, with the incorporation of parallelism and
timing. It is ideally suited to do quick simulation checks of algorithmic or protocol ideas of communication
networks. In this particular project, you will implement the code to simulate packet transmissions and
possible collisions in a basic wireless ad hoc network.
Installing PARSEC
First, you have to install PARSEC on your machine. The code is freely available for academic use from:
http://pcl.cs.ucla.edu/projects/parsec/
This webpage also contains a manual.
Most of the code was developed a while back, so it might take some extra setup steps on your part to get it
working. Check out the FAQ on the PARSEC webpage. Other then installing the code, you also need to do
the following (for Linux/Unix):
1) Set the environmental variable PCC_DIRECTORY to point to the PARSEC directory (replace
<parsec_path> with the complete path of your PARSEC installation). For example:
[csh,tcsh] setenv PCC_DIRECTORY <parsec_path>
[bash] export PCC_DIRECTORY=<parsec_path>
2) If you are using gcc-2.96 or higher as a C compiler, PARSEC might not work with the default settings.
In that case also change the PCC_PP_OPTIONS environment variable to:
-D__builtin_va_list=void* -D__STRICT_ANSI__ -E -U__GNUC__ -I.
Note: You can add both of these settings in .cshrc, .cshrc.private, .bashrc or .bash_profile.
To verify if you got PARSEC set up properly, download the ‘BasicNetwork’ example from the course
webpage and compile it by running the Makefile. An executable named ‘run’ will be created. Note: when
writing your own simulation, it is easiest if you copy the Makefile of this example and modify it
appropriately.
Once you have PARSEC installed and running properly, go through the manual. You can also have a look
at the ‘BasicNetwork’ example code. Now, you are ready to write your own PARSEC simulations.
