An Australia-based grid research project team has released a Java-based software toolkit designed to support modeling and simulation of worldwide grids.
GridSim Toolkit 1.0 enables users to conduct design and performance evaluations of scheduling algorithms and systems, according to GridSim Project team member Rajkumar Buyya, a Ph.D. student at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at
Monash University in Melbourne.
Buyya said the toolkit provides concurrent entities for creating application tasks, mapping of these tasks to resources and their management.
It also allows users to create representations for Grid resources, Grid Information Service, Grid statistics and multiple Grid users. Sample implementations are included in the GridSim 1.0 download on the GridSim Project Web site. Source code also is included in the download.
In a technical report published last October, Buyya and fellow GridSim team members Manzur Murshed and David Abramson said the primary objective of the GridSim Project is to create simulated grid environments that reflect real-world scenarios involving a "varying number of resources and users with different (policy) requirements." The simulations are used to test resource allocation techniques and the effectiveness of resource brokers and scheduling algorithms.
Many IT professionals and researchers may be more familiar with the grid toolkit developed by the five-year-old Globus Project. Globus is a collaboration involving several universities, public organizations and corporations such as IBM and Microsoft.
But Buyya said comparing the two toolkits is like "comparing apples and oranges."
"GridSim is a tool for design and evaluation of scheduling applications on Grid machines
(by simulation), whereas Globus is a middleware for submitting and executing
jobs/programs to real remote machines uniformly," Buyya said.
"Globus is a low-level middleware for Grid systems," Buyya said. "A machine that wants to
submit jobs to a remote machine can use the Globus facility to do so. That means you need to have Globus loaded on both machines. If you have many machines loaded with Globus, then you can run jobs on those machines parallelly using the Nimrod-G job scheduler."
However, there are limits to how many machines can run grid jobs simultaneously.
"With luck you may be able to get 20 machines," Buyya said. "But for scientific design and investigation of scheduling algorithms you need to explore for many thousands of machines, many different load conditions, many different kinds of user scenarios."
Using a simulator developed for the toolkit, he said, one "can create millions of simulated machines, users, and application scenarios for evaluation
of Grid scheduling systems."
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