Simulated Performance Analysis of Multiprocessor Dynamic Space-Sharing Scheduling policy

Multiprocessor systems are the wave of the future rightly said because they offer tremendous potential to solve inherently parallel and complex computation intensive applications. In order to exploit the full potential of such computing systems, job scheduling or processor allocation (both are considered synonyms here) decisions plays a great role. Such scheduling decisions involves determining number of jobs to execute simultaneously as well as the number of processors to be allocated to each running application in a manner so as to minimize job's execution time and/or maximizing throughput. The growth of such multiprocessor systems has in turn paves the way for creation of efficient processor allocation policies in order to reduce job response time and make efficient utilization of system's processors. When we submit jobs or applications to multiprocessor system which in turn relies on job scheduling policies to allocate processors to such incoming jobs, we are really interested to know how well such policies are performing. Performance evaluation methodologies like actual experimental setup i.e. multiprocessor or parallel system, Theoretical/Analytical modelling and Simulation can be used to evaluate the performance of scheduling policies. Actual experimentation on multiprocessor or parallel system is still a costly and complex approach and moreover these systems are still out of reach to young researchers even doing research in higher education institutes like universities or technical colleges in developing countries India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Bangladesh etc. There may be several reasons for the non-availability of these systems. One can very well evade out theoretical/analytical modelling to be used for the same purpose due to their inaccuracy. All these drawbacks have motivated us to switch towards virtualization or simulation of multiprocessor environment for the performance measurement of processor allocation policies. Simulation provides the powerful way to measure performance before the system under study has not actually been implemented. Such simulation can capture the dynamic interaction between applications and parallel architectures. Also it offers flexibility as one can make modifications to the simulation model and check their effect easily. This paper is an effort to provide a GUI based simulated multiprocessor framework/environment for the performance measurement of dynamic space sharing scheduling policy. Virtualization of multiprocessor environment is carried out with the help of simulated program which simulates all components of actual multiprocessor so as to give best possible outcome. Such simulated framework will provide the stage for the young researchers to model and evaluate their scheduling policies on virtual multiprocessor environment. The intention behind this multiprocessor simulation environment is the necessity to facilitate the research of multiprocessor systems and performance measurement of scheduling algorithms in developing countries.