The current trend of technology has brought parallel machines equipped with multiple processors and multiple memory sockets to be available off-the-shelf -- or via renting through Iaas Clouds -- at reasonable costs. This has opened the possibility of natively supporting HPC in diffused realities, like industry or academic labs. At the same time, the Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) area has given rise to attractive simulation engines, designed with orientation to high performance and scalability, also targeting differentiated exploitation of the specific support offered by the underlying hardware. In this article, we present an experimental study where we deploy two last-generation open-source PDES platforms -- one optimistic (USE) and one conservative (PARSIR) -- on top of two significantly different hardware chipsets based on either {\sf x86} CISC or {\sf powerPC} RISC technology, both offering multiple Non-Uniform-Memory-Access (NUMA) nodes and multiple tens of cores and hardware-threads (logical CPUs). Also, we consider real-world simulation models configured in a variety of different manners in order to investigate the actual execution profile of the PDES engines on the two distinct hardware platforms. Our objective is the one of providing insights on current performance trends, which can support decisions in terms of both strategies -- for software platforms to adopt -- and investments -- in terms of hardware platforms -- in the area of discrete event simulation.

翻译：当前技术趋势使得配备多处理器和多内存插槽的并行机器能够以合理成本在市场上直接获取——或通过IaaS云服务租用。这为在工业界和学术界等广泛场景中原生支持高性能计算提供了可能。与此同时，并行离散事件仿真（PDES）领域已涌现出多个具有吸引力的仿真引擎，这些引擎以高性能和可扩展性为设计导向，并致力于差异化利用底层硬件提供的特定支持。本文通过实验研究，将两种最新一代开源PDES平台——乐观型（USE）与保守型（PARSIR）——部署在两种基于不同指令集架构的硬件芯片组上：采用{\sf x86} CISC技术的平台与采用{\sf powerPC} RISC技术的平台。两种平台均提供多个非统一内存访问（NUMA）节点、数十个核心及硬件线程（逻辑CPU）。此外，我们通过配置多种不同参数的实际仿真模型，探究PDES引擎在两种异构硬件平台上的实际执行特征。本研究旨在揭示当前性能发展趋势，为离散事件仿真领域的软件平台选型策略与硬件平台投资决策提供参考依据。