GridSim: A Grid Simulation Toolkit for Resource Modelling and Application Scheduling for Parallel and Distributed Computing

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Introduction

Peer-to-Peer/Grid computing has emerged as a potential next generation platform for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. It is expected to involve millions of (heterogenous) resources scattering across multiple organizations, administrative domains, and policies. The management and scheduling of resources in such a large-scale distributed systems is complex and therefore, demands sophisticated tools for analysing and fine-tuning the algorithms before applying them to the real systems.

Simulation appears to be the only feasible way to analyse algorithms on large-scale distributed systems of heterogenous resources. Unlike using the real system in real time, simulation works well, without making the analysis mechanism unnecessary complex, by avoiding the overhead of co-ordination of real resources. Simulation is also effective in working with very large hypothetical problems that would otherwise require involvement of a large number of active users and resources, which is very hard to coordinate and build at large-scale research environment for investigation purpose.

The primary objective of this project is to investigate effective resource allocation techniques based on computational economy through simulation. We like to simulate millions of resources and thousands of users with varied requirements and study scalability of systems, algorithms, efficiency of resource allocation policies and satisfaction of users. We are also interested to explore how significantly the local economy and the global positioning (e.g., the time zone) of a particular resource play role in securing jobs under various pricing and demand/supply situations.

As such a large-scale simulation consumes large amount of computing power, we would like to use parallel and cluster computing systems. In our simulation we would like to model applications in the areas of biotechnology, astrophysics, network design, and high-energy physics in order to study usefulness of our resource allocation techniques. The results of our work will have significant impact on the way resource allocation is performed for solving problems on cluster and grid computing systems.

We also believe that the economy driven resource management and scheduling algorithms, that we are keenly interested to work with in this project, can benefit directly in modelling efficient e-commerce paradigm for service oriented computing. One of the potential outcomes of this project would be a programmable software toolkit that can be used by the researchers to analyse policies on large-scale distributed computing systems including the Internet, e-commerce, e-trading etc.

Main features

The GridSim toolkit allows modeling and simulation of entities in parallel and distributed computing (PDC) systems-users, applications, resources, and resource brokers (schedulers) for design and evaluation of scheduling algorithms. It provides a comprehensive facility for creating different classes of heterogeneous resources that can be aggregated using resource brokers. for solving compute and data intensive applications. A resource can be a single processor or multi-processor with shared or distributed memory and managed by time or space shared schedulers. The processing nodes within a resource can be heterogeneous in terms of processing capability, configuration, and availability. The resource brokers use scheduling algorithms or policies for mapping jobs to resources to optimize system or user objectives depending on their goals.

Overview of GridSim functionalities:

incorporates failures of Grid resources during runtime.
new allocation policy can be made and integrated into the GridSim Toolkit, by extending from AllocPolicy class.
has the infrastructure or framework to support advance reservation of a grid system.
incorporates a functionality that reads workload traces taken from supercomputers for simulating a realistic grid environment.
incorporates an auction model into GridSim.
incorporates a datagrid extension into GridSim.
incorporates a network extension into GridSim. Now, resources and other entities can be linked in a network topology.
incorporates a background network traffic functionality based on a probabilistic distribution. This is useful for simulating over a public network where the network is congested.
incorporates multiple regional GridInformationService (GIS) entities connected in a network topology. Hence, you can simulate an experiment with multiple Virtual Organizations (VOs).
adds ant build file to compile GridSim source files.

Project Team Members

Active Members:

Rajkumar Buyya
Marcos Dias de Assuncao
Saurabh Kumar Garg - Contact person for GridSim!
Bahman Javadi

Please use the GridSim mailing list to contact us.

External Contributors:

Agustin Caminero, Blanca Caminero and Carmen Carrion
Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM), Spain.
Uros Cibej and Borut Robic
The University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Gokul Poduval and Chen-Khong Tham
National University of Singapore.

Alumni:

Documentation

Latest GridSim API
Installing and Running GridSim (README) and FAQ
Instructions on how to use GridSim with Eclipse (pdf - 838KB) or JBuilder (pdf - 754KB) or JCreator (pdf - 819KB).
Examples of use and instructions are provided with the main distribution.

Download

Inside the downloaded package, it contains all the source, examples, jar, and API html files.

GridSim 5.2 beta (released on Nov. 25, 2010). [Release Notes]
GridSim 5.0 beta (released on Sep. 25, 2009). Size is about 3MB.
GridSim 4.2 beta (released on Oct 12, 2008). Size is 2.9MB.

[Release Notes] [README] [Changelog] [Older releases]

GridSim 5.0 uses a modified version of SimJava2. You do not need to download SimJava2 separately because a jar file is already included in the GridSim distribution. However, if you want, you can download the source code of SimJava2 with the changes from here.

Discussion Mailing List

Please visit the GridSim development website hosted on the SourceForge.net, and subscribe to the appropriate mailing list and participate in discussions:

gridsim-users (at) lists.sourceforge.net : for general queries and feedbacks.
gridsim-developers (at) lists.sourceforge.net : for contributing to GridSim or questions related to the existing GridSim code.

NOTE: please submit your query to one of the above mailing list.

To subscribe to the above mailing lists, please go to:

Software License

The GridSim Toolkit software are released as open source under the GPL license.
Copyright The Gridbus Project, GRIDS Lab, The University of Melbourne, 2002- to date.

Publications

Anthony Sulistio, Uros Cibej, Srikumar Venugopal, Borut Robic and Rajkumar Buyya A Toolkit for Modelling and Simulating Data Grids: An Extension to GridSim, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (CCPE), Online ISSN: 1532-0634, Printed ISSN: 1532-0626, 20(13): 1591-1609, Wiley Press, New York, USA, Sep. 2008.

Rajkumar Buyya and Anthony Sulistio, Service and Utility Oriented, Data Centers and Grid Computing Environments: Challenges and Opportunities for Modeling and Simulation Communities, Proc. of the 41st Annual Simulation Symposium (ANSS'08), April 13-16, 2008, Ottawa, Canada. Keynote Paper.

Agustin Caminero, Anthony Sulistio, Blanca Caminero, Carmen Carrion and Rajkumar Buyya, Simulation of Buffer Management Policies in Networks for Grids, Proc. of the 41th Annual Simulation Symposium (ANSS'08), April 13-16, 2008, Ottawa, Canada.

Agustin Caminero, Anthony Sulistio, Blanca Caminero, Carmen Carrion and Rajkumar Buyya, Extending GridSim with an Architecture for Failure Detection, Proc. of the 13th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS 2007), Dec. 5-7, 2007, Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Anthony Sulistio, Gokul Poduval, Rajkumar Buyya, and Chen-Khong Tham, On Incorporating Differentiated Levels of Network Service into GridSim, Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), ISSN: 0167-739X, Volume 23, Issue 4, May 2007, Pages: 606-615 Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 2007.

Marcos Dias de Assuncao and Rajkumar Buyya, An Evaluation of Communication Demand of Auction Protocols in Grid Environments, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Grid Economics & Business (GECON 2006), World Scientific Press, May 16, 2006, Singapore.

Anthony Sulistio, Gokul Poduval, Rajkumar Buyya, and Chen-Khong Tham, Constructing A Grid Simulation with Differentiated Network Service Using GridSim, Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Internet Computing (ICOMP 2005), June 27-30, 2005, Las Vegas, USA.

Anthony Sulistio, Chee Shin Yeo, and Rajkumar Buyya, A Taxonomy of Computer-based Simulations and its Mapping to Parallel and Distributed Systems Simulation Tools, International Journal of Software: Practice and Experience, Volume 34, Issue 7, Pages: 653-673, Wiley Press, USA, June 2004.

Anthony Sulistio and Rajkumar Buyya, A Grid Simulation Infrastructure Supporting Advance Reservation, Proc. of the 16th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS 2004), November 9-11, 2004, MIT, Cambridge, USA, pp. 1-7.

Anthony Sulistio, Chee Shin Yeo, and Rajkumar Buyya, Visual Modeler for Grid Modelling and Simulation (GridSim) Toolkit, Proc. of the 3rd International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2003), Springer Verlag Publications (LNCS Series), June 2 - 4, 2003, Melbourne, Australia.

Rajkumar Buyya, Manzur Murshed, and David Abramson, A Deadline and Budget Constrained Cost-Time Optimization Algorithm for Scheduling Task Farming Applications on Global Grids, Proc. of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA 2002), June 24 - 27, 2002, Las Vegas, USA.

Manzur Murshed and Rajkumar Buyya, Using the GridSim Toolkit for Enabling Grid Computing Education, Proc. of the International Conference on Communication Networks and Distributed Systems Modeling and Simulation (CNDS 2002), January 27-31, 2002, San Antonio, Texas, USA.

Rajkumar Buyya and Manzur Murshed, GridSim: A Toolkit for the Modeling and Simulation of Distributed Resource Management and Scheduling for Grid Computing, The Journal of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (CCPE), Volume 14, Issue 13-15, Wiley Press, Nov.-Dec., 2002.

Presentations, Poster and News Article about GridSim

Anthony Sulistio and Rajkumar Buyya, The GridSim Toolkit, Poster for the 3th International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science'07), Dec. 10-13, 2007, Bangalore, India.

Anthony Sulistio and Rajkumar Buyya, The GridSims: Real Tools for Simulated Parallel and Distributed Computing, International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW), Feature on 17 October 2007.

June 2005, Constructing A Grid Simulation with Differentiated Network Service Using GridSim (1.1MB), International Conference on Internet Computing (ICOMP'05), June 27-30, 2005, Las Vegas, USA.

April 2005, Overall GridSim 3.1 functionality (1.7MB)

GridSim: Java-based Modelling and Simulation of Computational Economy-based Scheduling for Grid Computing, Poster Exhibit @ CCGrid 2001: The First IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, May 15-18, 2001, Brisbane, Australia. [PDF] and [PPT] version.

Papers using GridSim results

Ewa Deelman, Gurmeet Singh, Miron Livny, Bruce Berriman, and John Good, The Cost of Doing Science on the Cloud: The Montage Example, Proc. of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (SC'08), Nov. 15-21, Austin, Texas, USA.

Krzysztof Kurowski, Jarek Nabrzyski, Ariel Oleksiak and Jan Weglarz, Grid Scheduling Simulations with GSSIM, Workshop on Scheduling and Resource Management for Parallel and Distributed Systems (SRMPDS), Proc. of the 13th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS 2007), Dec. 5-7, 2007, Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Kyong Hoon Kim and Rajkumar Buyya, Fair Resource Sharing in Hierarchical Virtual Organizations for Global Grids, Proceedings of the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2007, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Sept. 19-21, 2007, Austin, Texas, USA.

Gurmeet Singh, Carl Kesselman, Ewa Deelman, A Provisioning Model and its Comparison with Best Effort for Performance-Cost Optimization in Grids, Proceedings of the Sixteenth IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2007), Monterey, California, USA, June 25-29, 2007.

Arun Ramakrishnan, Gurmeet Singh, Henan Zhao, Ewa Deelman, Rizos Sakellariou, Karan Vahi, Kent Blackburn, David Meyers, Michael Samidi, Scheduling Data Intensive Workflows Onto Storage-Constrained Distributed Resources, Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2007), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 14-17, 2007.

Julio L. Albin, Juan A. Lorenzo, Jose Carlos Cabaleiro, Tomas F. Pena and Francisco F. Rivera, Simulation of Parallel Applications in GridSim, Proceedings of the 1st Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference (IBERGRID), Santiago de Compostela (Spain), May 14-16, 2007.

Vikas Agarwal, Gargi Dasgupta, Koustuv Dasgupta, Amit Purohit, Balaji Viswanathan, DECO: Data replication and Execution CO-scheduling for Utility Grids, In Proceedings of International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC), Chicago, USA, Dec 4-7, 2006.

Andrew Flahive, J. Wenny Rahayu, Bernady O. Apduhan, David Taniar, Simulating the Distributed Ontology Framework in the Semantic Grid Environment with GridSim, Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA 2006), pp. 717-723, CSREA Press, June 26-29, 2006, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

Sai Rahul Reddy, Market Economy Based Resource Allocation in Grids, Master Thesis, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, May 2006.

Syed Naqvi and Michel Riguidel, Grid Security Services Simulator (G3S) - A Simulation Tool for the Design and Analysis of Grid Security Solutions, Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science 2005, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Dec. 5-8, 2005, Melbourne, Australia.

Erik Elmroth and Peter Gardfjall, Design and Evaluation of a Decentralized System for Grid-wide Fairshare Scheduling, Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science 2005, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Dec. 5-8, 2005, Melbourne, Australia.

Jia Yu, Rajkumar Buyya and Chen Khong Tham, QoS-based Scheduling of Workflow Applications on Service Grids, Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science 2005, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Dec. 5-8, 2005, Melbourne, Australia.

Rajiv Ranjan, Rajkumar Buyya and Aaron Harwood, A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters, Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2005, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Sept. 27 - 30, 2005, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Chee Shin Yeo and Rajkumar Buyya, Service Level Agreement based Allocation of Cluster Resources: Handling Penalty to Enhance Utility, Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2005, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Sept. 27 - 30, 2005, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Jahanzeb Sherwani, Nosheen Ali, Nausheen Lotia, Zahra Hayat, and Rajkumar Buyya, Libra: A Computational Economy based Job Scheduling System for Clusters, International Journal of Software: Practice and Experience, Volume 34, Issue 6, Pages: 573-590, Wiley Press, USA, May 2004.