\endhtmlonly
</center>
+\htmlinclude index.toc
+
+\section hot_news HOT NEWS
+
+<b>SimGrid 3.0.1 was released on 22st of October 2005. Get it from
+<a href="https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/?group_id=12">here</a>.</b>
+
\section quick Quick start
SimGrid is a toolkit that provides core functionalities for the simulation
\subsection quick_more More information
-The API is described <a href="API/html/modules.html">here</a> while
-<a href="examples/html/modules.html">this page</a> presents some example of
-use.
+The API (along with some example of
+use) is described in \ref SimGrid_API.
For more information about the SimGrid toolkit, please simply keep reading
this page. It is organized as follow:
- - \ref overview: Presentation of the toolkit, of each of its components
+ - \ref overview : Presentation of the toolkit, of each of its components
and of their interactions.
- - \ref people: Who is behind this project.
- - \ref publications: Some articles providing more details about the
+ - \ref people : Who is behind this project.
+ - \ref publis : Some articles providing more details about the
SimGrid toolkit or using and validating it.
<hr>
\section overview Overview of the toolkit components
-As depicted by the following schema, the SimGrid toolkit is basically
-three-layered.
+As depicted by the following diagram, the SimGrid toolkit is basically
+three-layered (click on the picture to jump to a specific component).
\htmlonly
</center>
\endhtmlonly
-\subsection overview_fondation Basement layer
-
-The basement of the whole toolkit is constituted by the <b>\ref XBT_API
-(eXtended Bundle of Tools)</b>.
-
-It is a portable library providing some grounding features such as \ref
-XBT_log, \ref XBT_error and \ref XBT_config. XBT also encompass the
-following convenient datastructures: \ref XBT_dynar, \ref XBT_fifo, \ref
-XBT_dict, \ref XBT_heap, \ref XBT_set and \ref XBT_swag.
-
-See the \ref XBT_API section for more details.
-
-\subsection overview_kernel Simulation kernel layer
-
-The core functionnalities to simulate a virtual platform are provided by a
-module called <b>\ref SURF_API</b> ("that's historical, my friend"). It is
-very low-level and is not intended to be used as such by end-users. Instead,
-it serve as a basis for the higher level layer.
-
-SURF main features are a fast max-min linear solver and the ability to
-change transparently the model used to describe the platform. This greatly
-eases the comparison of the several models existing in the litterature.
-
-See the \ref SURF_API section for more details.
-
\subsection overview_envs Programmation environments layer
-This simulation kernel is used to build several programmation environments.
-Each of them target a specific audiance and constitute a different paradigm.
-To choose which of them you want to use, you have to think about what you
-want to do and what would be the result of your work.
+SimGrid provides several programmation environments built on top of a uniq
+simulation kernel. Each environment targets a specific audiance and
+constitutes a different paradigm. To choose which of them you want to use,
+you have to think about what you want to do and what would be the result of
+your work.
- If you want to study a theoritical problem and compare several
heuristics, you probably want to try <b>\ref MSG_API</b> (yet another
See the \ref GRAS_API section for more details.
If your favorite programming environment/model is not there (BSP,
-components, etc.) is not represented in the SimGrid toolkit yet, you may
-consider adding it. You should contact us first, though.
+components, DAG, etc.) is not represented in the SimGrid toolkit yet, you may
+consider adding it. You should contact us first on the
+<a href=http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/mailman/listinfo/simgrid-devel>SimGrid
+developers mailing list</a>, though.
+
+\subsection overview_kernel Simulation kernel layer
+
+The core functionnalities to simulate a virtual platform are provided by a
+module called <b>\ref SURF_API</b> ("that's historical, my friend"). It is
+very low-level and is not intended to be used as such by end-users. Instead,
+it serve as a basis for the higher level layer.
+
+SURF main features are a fast max-min linear solver and the ability to
+change transparently the model used to describe the platform. This greatly
+eases the comparison of the several models existing in the litterature.
+
+See the \ref SURF_API section for more details.
+
+\subsection overview_fondation Base layer
+
+The base of the whole toolkit is constituted by the <b>\ref XBT_API
+(eXtended Bundle of Tools)</b>.
+
+It is a portable library providing some grounding features such as \ref
+XBT_log, \ref XBT_ex and \ref XBT_config. XBT also encompass
+the following convenient datastructures: \ref XBT_dynar, \ref XBT_fifo, \ref
+XBT_dict, \ref XBT_heap, \ref XBT_set and \ref XBT_swag.
+
+See the \ref XBT_API section for more details.
+
Any question, remark or suggestion are welcome on the
-<a href=https://listes.ens-lyon.fr/wws/info/simgrid2-users>SimGrid users
+<a href=http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/mailman/listinfo/simgrid-user>SimGrid users
mailing list</a>.
<hr>
\section people People
-The authors of SimGrid are:
+SimGrid is a joint project between University of Hawai at Manoa, ID
+Laboratory (Grenoble, France) and University of Nancy (France). The
+authors of SimGrid are:
- - Henri Casanova <casanova#cs.ucsd.edu>
- - Arnaud Legrand <arnaud.legrand#imag.fr>
- - Martin Quinson <mquinson#debian.org>
+ - Henri Casanova <casanova#cs.ucsd.edu> (Information and Computer Sciences Department, University of Hawai`i at Manoa)
+ - Arnaud Legrand <arnaud.legrand#imag.fr> ("Informatique et Distribution" Laboratory (Grenoble, France), MESCal project)
+ - Martin Quinson <martin.quinson#loria.fr> (University of Nancy (Nancy, France), LORIA Laboratory, Algorille project)
\subsection contributers Contributers and alumni project members
- - Loris Marchal: wrote the new algorithm for simulation TCP
- bandwidth-sharing.
+ - Loris Marchal: wrote the algorithm for simulation TCP bandwidth-sharing.
- Julien Lerouge : wrote a XML parser for ENV descriptions and helped for
the general design during a 4 month period (march-june 2002)
in the LIP.
<hr>
-\section publications Selected publications
-
-When citing SimGrid, the prefered reference paper is <i>Scheduling
-Distributed Applications: the SimGrid Simulation Framework</i>, even if it's
-a bit old now. We are actively working on improving this.
-
-\subsection simulation About simulation
-
-\li <b>Scheduling Distributed Applications: the
- SimGrid Simulation Framework</b>\n
- by <em>Henri Casanova and Arnaud Legrand and Loris Marchal</em>\n
- Proceedings of the third IEEE International Symposium
- on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'03)\n
- Since the advent of distributed computer systems an active field
- of research has been the investigation of scheduling strategies
- for parallel applications. The common approach is to employ
- scheduling heuristics that approximate an optimal
- schedule. Unfortunately, it is often impossible to obtain
- analytical results to compare the efficacy of these heuristics.
- One possibility is to conducts large numbers of back-to-back
- experiments on real platforms. While this is possible on
- tightly-coupled platforms, it is infeasible on modern distributed
- platforms (i.e. Grids) as it is labor-intensive and does not
- enable repeatable results. The solution is to resort to
- simulations. Simulations not only enables repeatable results but
- also make it possible to explore wide ranges of platform and
- application scenarios.\n
- In this paper we present the SimGrid framework which enables the
- simulation of distributed applications in distributed computing
- environments for the specific purpose of developing and evaluating
- scheduling algorithms. This paper focuses on SimGrid v2, which
- greatly improves on the first version of the software with more
- realistic network models and topologies. SimGrid v2 also enables
- the simulation of distributed scheduling agents, which has become
- critical for current scheduling research in large-scale platforms.
- After describing and validating these features, we present a case
- study by which we demonstrate the usefulness of SimGrid for
- conducting scheduling research.
-
-
-\li <b>A Network Model for Simulation of Grid Application</b>\n
- by <em>Henri Casanova and Loris Marchal</em>\n
- \anchor paper_tcp
- In this work we investigate network models that can be
- potentially employed in the simulation of scheduling algorithms for
- distributed computing applications. We seek to develop a model of TCP
- communication which is both high-level and realistic. Previous research
- works show that accurate and global modeling of wide-area networks, such
- as the Internet, faces a number of challenging issues. However, some
- global models of fairness and bandwidth-sharing exist, and can be link
- withthe behavior of TCP. Using both previous results and simulation (with
- NS), we attempt to understand the macroscopic behavior of
- TCP communications. We then propose a global model of the network for the
- Grid platform. We perform partial validation of this model in
- simulation. The model leads to an algorithm for computing
- bandwidth-sharing. This algorithm can then be implemented as part of Grid
- application simulations. We provide such an implementation for the
- SimGrid simulation toolkit.\n
- ftp://ftp.ens-lyon.fr/pub/LIP/Rapports/RR/RR2002/RR2002-40.ps.gz
-
-
-\li <b>MetaSimGrid : Towards realistic scheduling simulation of
- distributed applications</b>\n
- by <em>Arnaud Legrand and Julien Lerouge</em>\n
- Most scheduling problems are already hard on homogeneous
- platforms, they become quite intractable in an heterogeneous
- framework such as a metacomputing grid. In the best cases, a
- guaranteed heuristic can be found, but most of the time, it is
- not possible. Real experiments or simulations are often
- involved to test or to compare heuristics. However, on a
- distributed heterogeneous platform, such experiments are
- technically difficult to drive, because of the genuine
- instability of the platform. It is almost impossible to
- guarantee that a platform which is not dedicated to the
- experiment, will remain exactly the same between two tests,
- thereby forbidding any meaningful comparison. Simulations are
- then used to replace real experiments, so as to ensure the
- reproducibility of measured data. A key issue is the
- possibility to run the simulations against a realistic
- environment. The main idea of trace-based simulation is to
- record the platform parameters today, and to simulate the
- algorithms tomorrow, against the recorded data: even though it
- is not the current load of the platform, it is realistic,
- because it represents a fair summary of what happened
- previously. A good example of a trace-based simulation tool is
- SimGrid, a toolkit providing a set of core abstractions and
- functionalities that can be used to easily build simulators for
- specific application domains and/or computing environment
- topologies. Nevertheless, SimGrid lacks a number of convenient
- features to craft simulations of a distributed application
- where scheduling decisions are not taken by a single
- process. Furthermore, modeling a complex platform by hand is
- fastidious for a few hosts and is almost impossible for a real
- grid. This report is a survey on simulation for scheduling
- evaluation purposes and present MetaSimGrid, a simulator built
- on top of SimGrid.\n
- ftp://ftp.ens-lyon.fr/pub/LIP/Rapports/RR/RR2002/RR2002-28.ps.gz
-
-\li <b>SimGrid: A Toolkit for the Simulation of Application
- Scheduling</b>\n
- by <em>Henri Casanova</em>\n
- Advances in hardware and software technologies have made it
- possible to deploy parallel applications over increasingly large
- sets of distributed resources. Consequently, the study of
- scheduling algorithms for such applications has been an active area
- of research. Given the nature of most scheduling problems one must
- resort to simulation to effectively evaluate and compare their
- efficacy over a wide range of scenarios. It has thus become
- necessary to simulate those algorithms for increasingly complex
- distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous environments. In this paper we
- present SimGrid, a simulation toolkit for the study of scheduling
- algorithms for distributed application. This paper gives the main
- concepts and models behind SimGrid, describes its API and
- highlights current implementation issues. We also give some
- experimental results and describe work that builds on SimGrid's
- functionalities.\n
- http://grail.sdsc.edu/papers/simgrid_ccgrid01.ps.gz
-
-\subsection research Papers using SimGrid results
-
-\li <b>Optimal algorithms for scheduling divisible workloads on
- heterogeneous systems</b>\n
- by <em>Olivier Beaumont and Arnaud Legrand and Yves Robert</em>\n
- In this paper, we discuss several algorithms for scheduling
- divisible loads on heterogeneous systems. Our main contributions
- are (i) new optimality results for single-round algorithms and (ii)
- the design of an asymptotically optimal multi-round algorithm. This
- multi-round algorithm automatically performs resource selection, a
- difficult task that was previously left to the user. Because it is
- periodic, it is simpler to implement, and more robust to changes in
- the speeds of processors or communication links. On the theoretical
- side, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first published
- result assessing the absolute performance of a multi-round
- algorithm. On the practical side, extensive simulations reveal
- that our multi-round algorithm outperforms existing solutions on a
- large variety of platforms, especially when the
- communication-to-computation ratio is not very high (the difficult
- case).\n
- ftp://ftp.ens-lyon.fr/pub/LIP/Rapports/RR/RR2002/RR2002-36.ps.gz
-\li <b>On-line Parallel Tomography</b>\n
- by <em>Shava Smallen</em>\n
- Masters Thesis, UCSD, May 2001
-\li <b>Applying Scheduling and Tuning to On-line Parallel Tomography </b>\n
- by <em>Shava Smallen, Henri Casanova, Francine Berman</em>\n
- in Proceedings of Supercomputing 2001
-\li <b>Heuristics for Scheduling Parameter Sweep applications in
- Grid environments</b>\n
- by <em>Henri Casanova, Arnaud Legrand, Dmitrii Zagorodnov and
- Francine Berman</em>\n
- in Proceedings of the 9th Heterogeneous Computing workshop
- (HCW'2000), pp349-363.
*/
