Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) journal

The manuscript “Simplified Workflow Simulation on Clouds based on Computation and Communication Noisiness” has been accepted for
publication in the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems journal (TPDS) with an impact factor of 4.181.

Authors: Roland Mathá, Sasko Ristov, Thomas Fahringer, Radu Prodan.

Abstract: Many researchers rely on simulations to analyze and validate their researched methods on Cloud infrastructures. However, determining relevant simulation parameters and correctly instantiating them to match the real Cloud performance is a difficult and costly operation, as minor configuration changes can easily generate an unreliable inaccurate simulation result. Using legacy values experimentally determined by other researchers can reduce the configuration costs, but is still inaccurate as the underlying public Clouds and the number of active tenants are highly different and dynamic in time. To overcome these deficiencies, we propose a novel model that simulates the dynamic Cloud performance by introducing noise in the computation and communication tasks, determined by a small set of runtime execution data. Although the estimating method is apparently costly, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis shows that the configuration parameters determined for a certain simulation setup can be used for other simulations too, thereby reducing the tuning cost by up to 82.46%, while declining the simulation accuracy by only 1.98% in average. Extensive evaluation also shows that our novel model outperforms other state-of-the-art dynamic Cloud simulation models, leading up to 22% lower makespan inaccuracy.

Acknowledgments: This work has been supported by the ASPIDE Project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No 801091.