An Architecture and Prototype for Monitoring Distributed Simulations of Distributed Systems

Designing and testing distributed systems can be a daunting task, especially when the system is composed of heterogeneous devices, it is expected to be robust to disruptions, and is meant to scale to a large number of nodes. In practice, this mandates the use of simulations to verify the system during development. Additionally, disruptions and disturbance patterns are hardly predictable, and the system’s behavior must thus be subject to test under widely varying conditions, typically implying a stochastic process and multiple simulation runs to assess whether the system meets its functional requirements. Often, running multiple simulations while a system is being developed is time- and resource-consuming, as results are visible and aggregated at termination, especially in cases in which simulations are distributed across multiple devices to speed up the computation. In this paper, we discuss a potential solution to monitor multiple distributed simulations, querying data efficiently while they progress, in order to provide early feedback to the developers. We present a general architecture for the system, discuss the technological opportunities and challenges, and provide a functional open-source prototype implementation based on a simulator used for several scientific exemplaries in the last decade.