Muclouds: Parallel Simulator for Large-Scale Cloud Computing Systems

This paper introduces Muclouds, a parallel simulation framework for simulating large-scale cloud computing systems. Muclouds improves the simulation performance for these large systems, such that the simulation time can be minimized. To achieve this goal, in this paper we propose a novel technique named stage and partition (SAP). SAP is based on the following observation: in an event-based simulation framework for cloud computing, the existence of the interaction and/or correlation of the events, which imposes simulation synchronization, is the major factor that prevents efficient parallelization. To achieve improved parallelization performance, SAP divides events into two main categories: non-interacting events and interacting events. Non-interacting events can be simulated simultaneously to achieve high simulation speed, whereas interacting events must be simulated sequentially to preserve accuracy. Using Muclouds, we constructed several scenarios to evaluate parallelization effectiveness and efficiency. We also conduct several experiments for performance comparisons with state-of-the-art schemes. Evaluation results show that Muclouds facilitates considerable performance improvements when compared with existing approaches.