Simdex: A Simulator of a Real Self-adaptive job-dispatching System Backend

Self-adaptive systems comprise a complex domain of computing systems that are intensively studied but sparsely employed in real applications. Furthermore, recent trends in computer science are steering towards machine learning which has yet to fully penetrate this domain. We would like to present Simdex – a realistic simulator of the self-adaptive backend that dispatches computing jobs among multiple workers. It is based on ReCodEx, a system for semi-automated evaluation of coding assignments that have been used for the past 5 years at our School of Computer Science. The simulator replays the workload logs recorded from ReCodEx over that period which provides a quite thorough evaluation and near-to-real feedback for the simulated scenarios. Furthermore, the design of the simulator is highly modular and allows the implementation of different self-adaptive controllers, including ones based on machine learning, as we demonstrate in our examples. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering $\rightarrow$Simulator /interpreter; • Computing methodologies $\rightarrow$Self-organization; • Computer systems organization $\rightarrow$Self-organizing autonomic computing.