Distributed simulation optimization and parameter exploration framework for the cloud

Simulation models are becoming an increasingly popular tool for the analysis and optimization of complex real systems in different fields. Finding an optimal system design requires performing a large sweep over the parameter space in an organized way. Hence, the model optimization process is extremely demanding from a computational point of view, as it requires careful, time-consuming, complex orchestration of coordinated executions. In this paper, we present the design of SOF (Simulation Optimization and exploration Framework in the cloud), a framework which exploits the computing power of a cloud computational environment in order to carry out effective and efficient simulation optimization strategies. SOF offers several attractive features. Firstly, SOF requires “zero configuration” as it does not require any additional software installed on the remote node; only standard Apache Hadoop and SSH access are sufficient. Secondly, SOF is transparent to the user, since the user is totally unaware that the system operates on a distributed environment. Finally, SOF is highly customizable and programmable, since it enables the running of different simulation optimization scenarios using diverse programming languages – provided that the hosting platform supports them – and different simulation toolkits, as developed by the modeler. The tool has been fully developed and is available on a public repository1 under the terms of the open source Apache License. It has been tested and validated on several private platforms, such as a dedicated cluster of workstations, as well as on public platforms, including the Hortonworks Data Platform and Amazon Web Services Elastic MapReduce solution

SOF: Zero Configuration Simulation Optimization Framework on the Cloud

Simulation models are becoming an increasingly popular tool for the analysis and optimization of complex real systems in different fields. Finding an optimal system design requires performing a large parameter sweep. In this paper, we present the design of SOF (Simulation Optimization and exploration Framework on the cloud), a framework which exploits the computing power of a cloud computational environment in order to realize effective and efficient simulation optimization strategies. SOF offers several attractive features: SOF requires «zero configuration» as it does not require any additional software installed on the remote node, SOF is transparent to the user, since the user is totally unaware that system operates on a distributed environment, SOF is highly customizable and programmable, since it enables the running of different simulation optimization scenarios on different simulation toolkits. The tool has been fully developed and is available on a public repository under the Apache public licence

D-MASON on the cloud: An experience with amazon web services

D-Mason framework is a parallel version of the Mason library for writing and running Agent-based simulations – a class of models that, by simulating the behavior of multiple agents, aims to emulate and/or predict complex phenomena. D-Mason has been conceived to harness the amount of unused computing power available in common installations like educational laboratory. Then the focus moved to dedicated installation, such as massively parallel machines or supercomputing centers. In this paper, D-Mason takes another step forward and now it canbeusedonacloudenvironment. The goal of the paper is twofold. Firstly, we are going to present D-Mason on the cloud – a D-Mason extension that, starting from an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) abstraction, and exploiting Amazon Web Services and StarCluster, provides a SIMulation-as-a-Service (SIMaaS) abstraction that simplifies the process of setting up and running distributed simulations in the cloud. Secondly, an additional goal of the paper is to assess computational and economic efficiency of running distributed multi-agent simulations on the Amazon Web Services EC2 instances. The computational speed and costs of an EC2 cluster will be compared against an on-site HPC cluster