GridMate: A Portable Simulation Environment for Large-Scale Adaptive Scientific Applications

In this paper, we present a portable simulation environment GridMate for large-scale adaptive scientific applications in multi-site Grid environments. GridMate is a discrete-event based simulator, consisting of abstractions of trace-based applications, computing resources, partitioners; and schedulers, a 3D visualization tool, and user interfaces. It supports the analysis of runtime management strategies that address spatial and temporal heterogeneity in both adaptive scientific applications and geographically distributed resources in Grid computing environments. The targeted applications are a class of emerging large-scale dynamic Grid applications that require large amount of computational resources typically spanning multiple sites and exhibit long execution times. The underlying partitioning and scheduling algorithms are based on our previous work on the hybrid space-time runtime management strategy (HRMS). HRMS defines a set of flexible mechanisms and policies to adapt to state transitions of both applications and resources. The major components of GridMate are developed in Java, making GridMate highly portable and extensible. The design of GridMate and simulation results using GridMate are presented.