A Generic Framework for Building Heterogeneous Simulations of Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems

There have been many systems available for parallel and distributed computing (PDC) applications such as grids, clusters, super-computers, clouds, peer-to-peer and volunteer computing systems. High-performance computing (HPC) has been an obvious candidate domain to take advantage of PDC systems. Most of the research on HPC has been conducted with simulations and has been generally focused on a specific type of PDC system. This paper, however, introduces a general purpose simulation model that can be easily enlarged for constructing simulations of many of the most well-known PDC system types. Although it might create a new vision for research activities in the simulation community, current simulation tools do not provide proper support for cooperation between software working in real-time and simulation time. In this paper, thus, we also present a promising approach for constructing hybrid simulations that offers great potential for many research areas. As a proof of concept, we implemented a prototype for our simulation model. Then, we are able to rely on this prototype to build simulations of various PDC systems. Thanks to hybrid simulation support of our model, we are able to combine and manage the simulated PDC systems with our previously developed policy-based management framework in simulation runs.