A Parallel Event System for Large-Scale Cloud Simulations in DISSECT-CF

Abstract

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) frameworks gained significant popularity to support and evaluate cloud computing environments. They support decision-making for complex scenarios, saving time and effort. The majority of these frameworks lack parallel execution. In spite being a sequential framework, DISSECT-CF introduced significant performance improvements when simulating Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. Even with these improvements over the state of the art sequential simulators, there are several scenarios (e.g., large scale Internet of Things or serverless computing systems) which DISSECT-CF would not simulate in a timely fashion. To remedy such scenarios this paper introduces parallel execution to its most abstract subsystem: the event system. The new event subsystem detects when multiple events occur at a specific time instance of the simulation and decides to execute them either on a parallel or a sequential fashion. This decision is mainly based on the number of independent events and the expected workload of a particular event. In our evaluation, we focused exclusively on time management scenarios. While we did so, we ensured the behaviour of the events should be equivalent to realistic, larger-scale simulation scenarios. This allowed us to understand the effects of parallelism on the whole framework, while we also shown the gains of the new system compared to the old sequential one. With regards to scaling, we observed it to be proportional to the number of cores in the utilised SMP host.