Section: Software

Distem

Participants : Tomasz Buchert, Emmanuel Jeanvoine, Lucas Nussbaum, Luc Sarzyniec.

Distem is a distributed systems emulator. In the context of research on Cloud, P2P, High Performance Computing or Grid systems, it can be used to transform an homogeneous cluster (composed of identical nodes) into an experimental platform where nodes have different performance, and are connected together through a complex network topology, thus facilitating the evaluation or benchmarking of applications targeting such environments.

Distem relies on modern Linux features (LXC, cgroups, cpufreq, iptables, traffic control) to steal resources from applications. At the node level, it provides the ability to introduce heterogeneity by splitting a multi-core node into several several virtual nodes of varying number of cores and CPU frequency. At the network level, it allows the user to describe and build virtual network topologies where each link has a given latency, and bandwidth limit.

Distem is controlled through a REST API to ease its integration into experiment scripts, but also provides a Ruby library and a command-line interface.

It has been registered with the APP, and is freely available under the GNU GPL.

More information is available from http://distem.gforge.inria.fr/ .