Simulation of Large Scale Computational Ecosystems with Alchemist: A Tutorial

Abstract

Many interesting systems in several disciplines can be modeled as networks of nodes that can store and exchange data: pervasive systems, edge computing scenarios, and even biological and bio-inspired systems. These systems feature inherent complexity, and often simulation is the preferred (and sometimes the only) way of investigating their behavior; this is true both in the design phase and in the verification and testing phase. In this tutorial paper, we provide a guide to the simulation of such systems by leveraging Alchemist, an existing research tool used in several works in the literature. We introduce its meta-model and its extensible architecture; we discuss reference examples of increasing complexity; and we finally show how to configure the tool to automatically execute multiple repetitions of simulations with different controlled variables, achieving reliable and reproducible results.

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“…Alchemist is designed to allow third parties to extend the simulator and reuse the existing specification language. Due to space constraints, we will not unravel all the details of the specification language in this paper: the interested reader can refer to a recent tutorial [61]. By leveraging the pre-existing extension mechanisms of Alchemist, we were able to write our extension in terms of new environments and nodes (containing the physical properties, see Figure 3) and new actions (defining the behaviour of the camera sensors and exposing the actuators for its control, see Figure 4).…”