Number of supported nodes

[G.Beinas]

Hello everyone,
what's the maximum number of nodes that ns-3 supports??

Thank you in advance,
G.Beinas

[Konstantinos]

Hi,

Have a look at this presentation: http://www.nsnam.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/WNS3_formatted.pdf

Largest Simulated Scenario in NS3

– 360,448,000 simulated nodes 

– 413,704.52 packet receive events per second

NS-3 can support very large number of nodes. However, your computer will become the bottleneck and you will have to go to a distributed system.

[pdbarnes]

In [1] we used plain vanilla ns-3 and fit 750K nodes in 32 GB.  This tells you the gross memory scaling for ns-3 (~42kB/node, including code and data, for mixed CSMA and P2P channels, YMMV).

Since each MPI rank has to have the entire model, even in a distributed (parallel) model, you are limited by the amount of memory on a single compute node.  The ARL work cited by Konstantinos went through some hoops to instantiate portions of the 360M node model on each distributed compute node (MPI rank), forming a sort of federated model. 

We (LLNL) are working on changes to ns-3 that will break this memory barrier, allowing each MPI rank to instantiate only a portion of the model.  This will enable much larger models, limited by your cluster memory, not your compute node memory.

Peter

[1] (Direct) https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/703132.pdf

(Paywalled, but citable) http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2512737