DISSECT-CF: a simulator to foster energy-aware scheduling in infrastructure clouds

TL;DR

DISSECT-CF is a new, extensible cloud simulator designed to evaluate energy-aware scheduling and internal IaaS behaviors efficiently, addressing limitations of existing tools.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible simulation framework with hierarchical energy metering and improved performance for multi-layer scheduler analysis.

Findings

Validated against real IaaS behavior

Demonstrated faster performance than existing simulators

Supported complex energy-aware scheduling scenarios

Abstract

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) systems offer on demand virtual infrastructures so reliably and flexibly that users expect a high service level. Therefore, even with regards to internal IaaS behaviour, production clouds only adopt novel ideas that are proven not to hinder established service levels. To analyse their expected behaviour, new ideas are often evaluated with simulators in production IaaS system-like scenarios. For instance, new research could enable collaboration amongst several layers of schedulers or could consider new optimisation objectives such as energy consumption. Unfortunately, current cloud simulators are hard to employ and they often have performance issues when several layers of schedulers interact in them. To target these issues, a new IaaS simulation framework (called DISSECT-CF) was designed. The new simulator's foundation has the following goals: easy extensibility, support energy evaluation of IaaSs and to enable fast evaluation of many scheduling and IaaS internal behaviour related scenarios. In response to the requirements of such scenarios, the new simulator introduces concepts such as: a unified model for resource sharing and a new energy metering framework with hierarchical and indirect metering options. Then, the comparison of several simulated situations to real-life IaaS behaviour is used to validate the simulator's functionality. Finally, a performance comparison is presented between DISSECT-CF and some currently available simulators.