Evaluation of cloud simulators for energy-related applications

Simulation tools play a critical role in various domains of cloud computing. They offer researchers and infrastructure designers a virtual environment to work in, eliminating the expenses associated with physical infrastructure, so those platforms could offer determinant support to analyze the performance of cloud systems and the related data centers. For those reasons, many cloud simulators have been developed. They are currently used by academics and practitioners, but only a few of these provide useful features in order to perform effective simulations of cloud systems for energy-related issues. The goal of this work is to help academics and professionals interested in energy-aware simulations of cloud systems to select the most suitable simulation platform for their purposes. The first part of this paper reviews the five simulators that hold the most promising features regarding energy issues. Subsequently, an evaluation metric has been introduced, based on five qualitative indexes: Last update, Popularity, Availability, Granularity, and Performance profile. The evaluation aims to provide researchers with suggestions for the best simulator choice.