I have a new post at my Wind River blog, about variability and determinism and how these two concepts interact. In short, even a deterministic simulator can expose great variability in a software workload and target system behavior.
Tag: repeatability
Simulation Determinism: Necessary or Evil?
In my series (well, I have one previous post about checkpointing) about misunderstood simulation technology items, the turn has come to the most difficult of all it seems: determinism. Determinism is often misunderstood as meaning “unchanging” or “constant” behavior of the simulation. People tend to assume that a deterministic simulation will not reveal errors due to nondeterministic behavior or races in the modeled system, which is a complete misunderstanding. Determinism is a necessary feature of any simulation system that wants to be really helpful to its users, not an evil that hides errors.
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