Section: New Results

Simulation of Large Scale Distributed Systems

Participants : Frédéric Desprez, Jonathan Rouzaud-Cornabas, Frédéric Suter.

Versatile, Scalable, and Accurate Simulation of Distributed Applications and Platforms

The study of parallel and distributed applications and platforms, whether in the cluster, grid, peer-to-peer, volunteer, or cloud computing domain, often mandates empirical evaluation of proposed algorithmic and system solutions via simulation. Unlike direct experimentation via an application deployment on a real-world testbed, simulation enables fully repeatable and configurable experiments for arbitrary hypothetical scenarios. Two key concerns are accuracy (so that simulation results are scientifically sound) and scalability (so that simulation experiments can be fast and memory-efficient). While the scalability of a simulator is easily measured, the accuracy of many state-of-the-art simulators is largely unknown because they have not been sufficiently validated. In this work we describe recent accuracy and scalability advances made in the context of the SimGrid simulation framework. A design goal of SimGrid is that it should be versatile, i.e., applicable across all aforementioned domains. We present quantitative results that show that SimGrid compares favorably to state-of-the-art domain-specific simulators in terms of scalability, accuracy, or the trade-off between the two. An important implication is that, contrary to popular wisdom, striving for versatility in a simulator is not an impediment but instead is conducive to improving both accuracy and scalability.

Simulation of MPI Applications with Time-Independent Traces

Analyzing and understanding the performance behavior of parallel applications on parallel computing platforms is a long-standing concern in the High Performance Computing community. When the targeted platforms are not available, simulation is a reasonable approach to obtain objective performance indicators and explore various hypothetical scenarios. In the context of applications implemented with the Message Passing Interface, two simulation methods have been proposed, on-line simulation and off-line simulation, both with their own drawbacks and advantages. In this work we present an off-line simulation framework, i.e., one that simulates the execution of an application based on event traces obtained from an actual execution. The main novelty of this work, when compared to previously proposed off-line simulators, is that traces that drive the simulation can be acquired on large, distributed, heterogeneous, and non-dedicated platforms. As a result the scalability of trace acquisition is increased, which is achieved by enforcing that traces contain no time-related information. Moreover, our framework is based on an state-of-the-art scalable, fast, and validated simulation kernel.

Adding Storage Simulation Capacities to the SimGrid Toolkit

For each kind of distributed computing infrastructures, i.e., clusters, grids, clouds, data centers or supercomputers, storage is a essential component to cope with the tremendous increase in scientific data production and the ever-growing need for data analysis and preservation. Understanding the performance of a storage subsystem or dimensioning it properly is an important concern for which simulation can help by allowing for fast, fully repeatable, and configurable experiments for arbitrary hypothetical scenarios. However, most simulation frameworks tailored for the study of distributed systems offer no or little abstractions or models of storage resources.

In this work we extend SimGrid, a versatile toolkit for the simulation of large-scale distributed computing systems, with storage simulation capacities. We define the required abstractions and propose a new API to handle storage components and their contents in SimGrid-based simulators. Then we characterize the performance of the fundamental storage component that are disks and derive models of these resources. Finally we list several concrete use cases of storage simulations in clusters, grids, clouds, and data centers for which the proposed extension would be beneficial.