Pewss: A platform of extensible workflow simulation service for workflow scheduling research

Abstract

This paper presents a Platform of Extensible Workflow Simulation Service (Pewss), which we have developed to provide a cloud service for aiding research work in workflow scheduling. The simulation has been a major tool for performance evaluation and comparison in workflow scheduling research. However, researchers usually have to develop their own simulation programs with limited functionality, simply outputting summarized performance results. Pewss has been developed for easing and improving current practices in conducting performance simulations during studying of existing workflow scheduling algorithms or designing of new scheduling algorithms. Pewss has been designed based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, adopting a multiuser Web-based client/server architecture. Conducting simulation experiments on Pewss, researchers simply have to implement the scheduling algorithm under study instead of a whole simulation environment, allowing them to focus on their research work without spending unnecessary efforts on the simulation implementation details. Pewss provides the visualization of a workflow execution schedule based on simulation results, offering a convenient way for researchers to gain an insight into the effectiveness, characteristics, and performance bottleneck of scheduling algorithms. As a multiuser environment, Pewss also provides functionality for researchers to facilitate comparative performance analysis and collaborative research works effectively. Pewss has been used in our research work on task-parallel workflow scheduling and has been planned to be extended to support other types of workflow scheduling research problems, eg, mixed-parallel workflows.

WRENCH: A Framework for Simulating Workflow Management Systems

“…A number of simulators have been developed that target scientific workflows. Some of them are stand-alone simulators [11], [35]- [37]. Others are integrated with a particular WMS to promote more faithful simulation and code reuse [38], [39] or to execute simulations at runtime to guide on-line scheduling decisions made by the WMS [40].…”

“…They observe that many of these simulators do not capture the details of underlying infrastructures and/or use naive simulation models. This is the case with custom simulators such as that in [36], [37], [40]. But it is also the case with workflow simulators built on top of generic simulation frameworks that provide convenient userlevel abstractions but fail to model the details of the underlying infrastructure, e.g., the simulators in [11], [35], [38], which build on the CloudSim [25] or GroudSim [24] frameworks.…”

Developing accurate and scalable simulators of production workflow management systems with WRENCH

“…A number of simulators have been developed that target scientific workflows. Some of them are stand-alone simulators [35,36,37,11,53]. Others are integrated with a particular WMS to promote more faithful simulation and code reuse [38,39,54] or to execute simulations at runtime to guide on-line scheduling decisions made by the WMS [40].…”

“…They observe that many of these simulators do not capture the details of underlying infrastructures and/or use naive simulation models. This is the case with custom simulators such as that in [40,36,37]. But it is also the case with workflow simulators built on top of generic simulation frameworks that provide convenient user-level abstractions but fail to model the details of the underlying infrastructure, e.g., the simulators in [35,38,11], which build on the CloudSim [25] or GroudSim [24] frameworks.…”

“…Several simulation frameworks have been developed that target the parallel and distributed computing domain [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. Some simulation frameworks have also been developed specifically for the scientific workflow domain [35,36,37,11,38,39,40].…”