Parallel Simulation Models for the Evaluation of Future Large-Scale Datacenter Networks

The recent trend for Software as a Service and other types of cloud services is driving demand for data centers of ever increasing scale. This will require the scaling up and scaling out of existing data center architectures and will ultimately need new architectures featuring new topologies for the data center networks that interconnect its constituent nodes. The preferred tool for the detailed evaluation of such designs is simulation, as it gives finer detail than analysis at lower cost than testbed evaluation. Realistic simulation times require that the simulation itself be capable of being scaled out, i.e., it should be amenable to parallelization. We describe a simulation framework, together with a methodology for partitioning the relevant simulation models to allow their parallel implementation, and demonstrate its validity by applying it to the simulation of a hybrid optical/electrical network architecture using a cluster of high-end servers. We report on results capturing the performance of our simulator and discuss how these are associated with the underlying hardware hosting the simulation.