The information contained herein may be outdated. Please do not send me any request for updates. Please let me know if you will be interested. Parallel or distributed simulation refers to the execution of discrete-event simulation programs on a multiprocessor system or network of workstations.
Primary goal is to obtain higher performance via parallel execution.
Sometimes the nature of the simulation itself may be distributed, as is the case for the simulators used in military training. They more or less mean the same set of techniques. There are quite a few introductory or tutorial articles in literature that present a broad background of this area. Today, David Nicol and Richard Fujimoto, Annals of Operations Research, December 1994. Also appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernatics, Vol 26, No.4, 1996.