TR-95-08-02.ps.Z

Z. Xu 
``Simulation of Heterogeneous Networks of Workstations" 

in Proceedings of MASCOTS'96, February, 1996.  

Abstract
--------

A Network of Workstations (NOW) has become an important distributed 
platform for large-scale scientific computations. A practical NOW system 
is heterogeneous and nondedicated, where computing power varies among the 
workstations and multiple jobs may interact with each other during 
execution. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of 
a simulation system for a nondedicated heterogeneous NOW. This 
simulator provides many options to users to specify and quantify 
system architectures, network heterogeneity and time-sharing factors, 
such as speeds of different processors, memory organizations, network 
topology, communication structures, and workload distributions. The 
simulator also supports execution of message-passing parallel programs 
written in C and the PVM library. The software structure of the simulator 
is well-modularized and highly extensible, which makes it easy to integrate 
other existing processor, memory and network simulators.