Integration of an event-based simulation framework into a scientific workflow execution environment for Grids and clouds

• Authors: Simon Ostermann;Kassian Plankensteiner;Daniel Bodner;Georg Kraler;Radu Prodan
• Venue: ServiceWave'11 Proceedings of the 4th European conference on Towards a service-based internet
• Year: 2011

The utilisation of Grid and Cloud-based computing environments for solving scientific problems has become an increasingly used practice in the last decade. To ease the use of these global distributed resources, sophisticated middleware systems have been developed, enabling the transparent execution of applications by hiding low-level technology details from the user. The ASKALON environment is such a system, which supports the development and execution of distributed applications such as scientific workflows or parameter studies in Grid and Cloud computing environments. On the other hand, simulation is a widely accepted approach to analyse and further optimise the behaviour of software systems. Beside the advantage of enabling repeatable deterministic evaluations, simulations are able to circumvent the difficulties in setting up and operating multi-institutional Grid systems, thus providing a lightweight simulated distributed environment on a single machine. In this paper, we present the integration of the GroudSim Grid and Cloud event-based simulator into the ASKALON environment. This enables system, application developers, and users to perform simulations using their accustomed environment, thereby benefiting from the combination of an established real-world platform and the advantages of a simulation.