Parallel discrete event simulation
Communications of the ACM - Special issue on simulation
The Wisconsin Wind Tunnel: virtual prototyping of parallel computers
SIGMETRICS '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Shade: a fast instruction-set simulator for execution profiling
SIGMETRICS '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Embra: fast and flexible machine simulation
Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Using the SimOS machine simulator to study complex computer systems
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)
MediaBench: a tool for evaluating and synthesizing multimedia and communicatons systems
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Asim: A Performance Model Framework
Computer
Multifacet's general execution-driven multiprocessor simulator (GEMS) toolset
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News - Special issue: dasCMP'05
The M5 Simulator: Modeling Networked Systems
IEEE Micro
To infinity and beyond: time-warped network emulation
NSDI'06 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 3
The PARSEC benchmark suite: characterization and architectural implications
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Parallel architectures and compilation techniques
COTSon: infrastructure for full system simulation
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
An Adaptive Synchronization Technique for Parallel Simulation of Networked Clusters
ISPASS '08 Proceedings of the ISPASS 2008 - IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and software
SlackSim: a platform for parallel simulations of CMPs on CMPs
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
Difference engine: harnessing memory redundancy in virtual machines
OSDI'08 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
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Simulating contemporary computer systems is a challenging endeavor, especially when it comes to simulating high-end setups involving multiple servers. The simulation environment needs to run complete software stacks, including operating systems, middleware, and application software, and it needs to simulate network and disk activity next to CPU performance. In addition, it needs the ability to scale out to a large number of server nodes while attaining good accuracy and reasonable simulation speeds. This paper presents VSim, a novel simulation methodology for multi-server systems. VSim leverages virtualization technology for simulating a target system on a host system. VSim controls CPU, network and disk performance on the host, and it gives the illusion to the software stack to run on a target system through time dilation. VSim can simulate multiple targets per host, and it employs a distributed simulation scheme across multiple hosts for simulations at scale. Our experimental results demonstrate VSim's accuracy: typical errors are below 6% for CPU, disk, and network performance. Real-life workloads involving the Lucene search engine and the Olio Web 2.0 benchmark illustrate VSim's utility and accuracy (average error of 3.2%). Our current setup can simulate up to five target servers per host, and we provide a Hadoop workload case study in which we simulate 25 servers. These simulation results are obtained at a simulation slowdown of one order of magnitude compared to native hardware execution.