2–6 Mar 2009
Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy
Europe/Rome timezone

Enabling OMNET++ Simulations on the Grid

5 Mar 2009, 16:00
20m
Michelangelo (120) (Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy)

Michelangelo (120)

Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy

Viale Africa 95100 Catania
Oral Experiences from application porting and deployment New Application Areas

Speaker

Mr Gergely Sipos (MTA SZTAKI)

Description

OMNeT++ is a C++-based discrete event simulation package primarily targeted at simulating computer networks and other distributed systems. In collaboration with the MTA SZTAKI Application Porting Centre the OMNET++ framework has been ported to the EGEE Grid. The presentation introduces the steps that were taken to enable OMNET++ on gLite. The work has exploited the parameter definition services of OMNET++ and the parameter study support tools ofthe P-GRADE grid Portal.

Conclusions and Future Work

The work demonstrates the steps and benefits of enabling the open source OMNET++ application on the EGEE Grid. The P-GRADE grid Portal enabled the loose integration of OMNET++ with gLite. While OMNET++ remains as a developer environment, the P-GRADE Portal serves as a manager to execute large simulations on the Grid. Our model of a Web-service in OMNET++ demonstrated that a simulation which would run for several days on a single computer can finish on EGEE within a few hours.

URL for further information

OMNET++ Community: www.omnetpp.org
MTA SZTAKI Porting Centre: www.lpds.sztaki.hu/gasuc

Impact

The user and beneficiary of the grid-enabled OMNET++ application can be anyone who runs simulations of communication networks, IT systems, queuing networks or business processes. The total execution time of the simulation should be over a few hours on a single computer to feel the need of the grid-enabled version. This is a typical situation for OMNET++ users, as one run in OMNET++ can easily last for 10-15 minutes and a few dozen of those runs are needed to evaluate a model under various conditions. Because OMNeT++ is free for academic and non-profit usage, the size of the potential user community of its grid-enabled version is large. OMNeT++ has been available to the public since September 1997, and by now it has a fairly large user community and a mailing list. Besides anonymous downloads, there have been registered downloads from over 40 universities worldwide. For the User Forum audience the presentation is a technical success story of application porting and application usage.

Keywords

application porting, OMNET++, open source, P-GRADE Portal, simulation

Detailed analysis

Using the parameter study features of the P-GRADE Portal environment we have created a grid application that enables the OMNET++ simulation framework on gLite and can simulate distributed system using resources from the EGEE and SEE-GRID infrastructures. End users can achieve significant speedup in system simulation by the grid-enabled version of OMNET++. We have created the model of a Web service in OMNET++ to demonstrate that

  1. Configurable queuing models can be submitted to the grid enabled OMNET++ application by end-users without grid knowledge and

  2. A large-scale grid infrastructure can provide significant performance increase for OMNeT++-based simulations.

Our solution lets OMNET++ users develop their custom simulation models with parameter values on their local machines in OMNET++, and then use the grid only for execution of the model The Web based interfaces of the OMNETT++ workflow in P-GRADE Portal provides a user friendly environment for this latter step.

Authors

Mr Gergely Sipos (MTA SZTAKI) Mr Miklós Kozlovszky (MTA SZTAKI)

Co-authors

Mr András Varga (OMNET++) Mr Ákos Balaskó (MTA SZTAKI)

Presentation materials