The ability to perform very large simulations would be beneficial to some areas of scientific research such as the study of computer networks and neurological activity. Improvements in computer technology and advances in parallel discrete-event simulation research continue to reduce the running times of large simulations. When a program requires more storage space than is available in RAM, the traditional approach is to utilize the disk as an additional layer in the memory hierarchy.
Disk space is less expensive than memory, but access times are also significantly longer.
The running times of programs can increase significantly if it is left to the operating system to schedule disk accesses using demand paging. If the disk is to be effectively used as virtual memory, data must be prefetched so that it is already in memory at the time when it is needed. The simulation must also be planned carefully so that the number of times data must be moved to and from disk is minimal. This goal of this project is to create a simulation engine which is capable of performing large simulations which rely heavily on the disks to provide storage space. The amount of storage required for the simulation could be between 10 and 100 times the size of available memory.