1,719 research outputs found
Parallel and Distributed Simulation from Many Cores to the Public Cloud (Extended Version)
In this tutorial paper, we will firstly review some basic simulation concepts
and then introduce the parallel and distributed simulation techniques in view
of some new challenges of today and tomorrow. More in particular, in the last
years there has been a wide diffusion of many cores architectures and we can
expect this trend to continue. On the other hand, the success of cloud
computing is strongly promoting the everything as a service paradigm. Is
parallel and distributed simulation ready for these new challenges? The current
approaches present many limitations in terms of usability and adaptivity: there
is a strong need for new evaluation metrics and for revising the currently
implemented mechanisms. In the last part of the paper, we propose a new
approach based on multi-agent systems for the simulation of complex systems. It
is possible to implement advanced techniques such as the migration of simulated
entities in order to build mechanisms that are both adaptive and very easy to
use. Adaptive mechanisms are able to significantly reduce the communication
cost in the parallel/distributed architectures, to implement load-balance
techniques and to cope with execution environments that are both variable and
dynamic. Finally, such mechanisms will be used to build simulations on top of
unreliable cloud services.Comment: Tutorial paper published in the Proceedings of the International
Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS 2011). Istanbul
(Turkey), IEEE, July 2011. ISBN 978-1-61284-382-
Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs
Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute
and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical
datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network
and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety
of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it
deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently.
Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities
and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic
with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport
protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve
datacenter network performance.
In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter
networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties,
general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control
objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important
characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all
existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of
existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and
factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss
various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management
schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing,
multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges
as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper,
we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically
dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently
and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
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