DistWalk: A Distributed Workload Emulator

This paper introduces DistWalk, a flexible, distributed, scalable, and open-source toolkit designed to emulate compute, network, and storage workloads across a networked infrastructure, and measure the resulting end-to-end latency. DistWalk provides fine-grained control over the workload behavior, which consists of a graph-like sequence of operations spanning multiple servers, It supports several communication protocols and traffic patterns, and enables the customization of several factors, such as the duration and parallelism of computeintensive operations, and the I/O data access and synchronization mode, among others. The proposed toolkit may be used to experiment with a variety of deployment models, from bare-metal to virtualized or containerized environments, e.g., using Cloud/Edge infrastructures, OpenStack, Kubernetes, or other orchestrators, allowing for experimental comparisons of the achievable latency across a wide range of system-level configurations.