Performance analysis of parallel demographic simulation

Today, we have seen an increase in the number of papers on parallel simulation applications outside the traditional military and network simulations areas, such as in the physical science and management science. One of the new areas in which parallel simulation could be used is demography, specifically for population projection. In this paper, we report the performance evaluation results of a parallel demographic simulation tool called Yades. We investigate the effect of three factors: unbalanced workload, heterogeneous processing speed and heterogeneous communication latency on performance measures such as: time spent in executing useful events, time spent for overhead and the number of rollbacks. The results are consistent with what has been reported in other application areas of parallel simulation. Since the application in demography is new, it is useful to quantify the effect of the three factors on performance.