Collaborative Research: Elements: Simulation-driven Evaluation of Cyberinfrastructure Systems

Most scientific breakthroughs and discoveries are now preconditioned on performing complex processing of vast amounts of data as conveniently, reliably, and efficiently as possible. This requires high-end interconnected compute and storage resources, as well as software systems to automate the processing on these resources. An enormous amount of effort has been invested in producing such 'cyberinfrastructure' software systems. And yet, developing and evolving these systems so that they are as efficient as possible, while anticipating future cyberinfrastructure opportunities and needs, is an open challenge. This project transforms the way in which these systems are evaluated, so that their capabilities can be developed and evolved judiciously. The traditional evaluation approach is to observe executions of these systems on real-world hardware resources. Although seemingly natural, this approach suffers from many shortcomings. Instead, this project focuses on simulating these executions. Simulation has tremendous, and untapped, potential for transforming the development cycle of cyberinfrastructure systems. Specifically, this project produces software elements that can be easily integrated into existing and future systems to afford them with simulation capabilities. These capabilities make it possible for developers to put their systems through the wringer and observe their behaviors for arbitrary operating conditions, including ones that go beyond current hardware platforms and scientific applications. Simply put, these capabilities will make it possible to establish a solid experimental science approach for the development of cyberinfrastructure systems that support current and future scientific endeavors that are critical to the development of our society.

The cyberinfrastructure has been the object of intensive research and development, resulting in a rich set of interoperable software systems that are used to support science. A key challenge is the development of systems that can execute application workloads efficiently, while anticipating future cyberinfrastructure opportunities and needs. This project aims to transform the way in which these systems are evaluated, so that their capabilities can be evolved based on a sound, quantitative experimental science approach. The traditional evaluation approach is to use full-fledged software stacks to execute application workloads on actual cyberinfrastructure deployments. Unfortunately, this approach suffers from several shortcomings: real-world experiments are time- and labor-intensive, and they are limited to currently available hardware and software configurations. An alternative to real-world experiments that does not suffer from these shortcomings is simulation, i.e., the implementation and use of a software artifact that models the functional and performance behaviors of software and hardware stacks of interest. This project uses simulation to transform the way in which cyberinfrastructure systems are evaluated as part of their long-term development cycles. This is achieved via software elements for enhancing production cyberinfrastructure systems with simulation capabilities so as to enable quantitative evaluation of these systems for arbitrary execution scenarios. Creating these scenarios requires little labor, and executions can be simulated accurately and orders of magnitude faster than their real-world counterparts. Furthermore, simulations are perfectly reproducible and observable. While this approach is general, its effectiveness will be demonstrated by applying it to a number of production systems, namely, workflow management systems. This project capitalizes on the years of development invested in the SimGrid and WRENCH simulation frameworks.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.