A simulation as a service cloud middleware

Abstract

Many seemingly simple questions that individual users face in their daily lives may actually require substantial number of computing resources to identify the right answers. For example, a user may want to determine the right thermostat settings for different rooms of a house based on a tolerance range such that the energy consumption and costs can be maximally reduced while still offering comfortable temperatures in the house. Such answers can be determined through simulations. However, some simulation models as in this example are stochastic, which require the execution of a large number of simulation tasks and aggregation of results to ascertain if the outcomes lie within specified confidence intervals. Some other simulation models, such as the study of traffic conditions using simulations may need multiple instances to be executed for a number of different parameters. Cloud computing has opened up new avenues for individuals and organizations with limited resources to obtain answers to problems that hitherto required expensive and computationally-intensive resources. This paper presents SIMaaS, which is a cloudbased Simulation-as-a-Service to address these challenges. We demonstrate how lightweight solutions using Linux containers (e.g., Docker) are better suited to support such services instead of heavyweight hypervisor-based solutions, which are shown to incur substantial overhead in provisioning virtual machines on-demand. Empirical results validating our claims are presented in the context of two case studies.

Architectural Design Space for Modelling and Simulation as a Service: A Review

“…Pluggable component-based architecture style (also known as plug-and-play architecture [60]) has been reported in two papers [61,62]. A pluggable component aims to extend the functionality of a core application [60,63].…”

The Internet of Simulation, a Specialisation of the Internet of Things with Simulation and Workflow as a Service (SIM/WFaaS)

“…One of the central tenets of IoS is the concept of SIMaaS [22] which extends the well known paradigm of SaaS (Figure 3). Similarly to SaaS, simulations are made available to users in an on-demand fashion whilst their execution is managed by the system.…”

BEFTIGRE: Behaviour‐driven full‐tier green evaluation of mobile cloud applications

“…PerfMon Server Agent is an open source server monitoring library built on SIGAR API. It is popularly used for gathering resource usage information of cloud VMs . However, server agent is not self‐sufficient for MCA; therefore, we integrate it into our proposed Beftigre orchestrator alongside server network throttling and resource load generation.…”

“…It is popularly used for gathering resource usage information of cloud VMs. 28,29 However, server agent is not self-sufficient for MCA; therefore, we integrate it into our proposed Beftigre orchestrator alongside server network throttling and resource load generation. The integration into the orchestrator makes it possible to capture the resource usage for specific environment conditions.…”