xocean / 2d-placement

2D-Placement : Exploiting Inter-Flow Relationship for Coflow Placement in Datacenters

2D-Placement is an algorithm to decide the endpoint placement for Coflows, so as to optimize the Coflow performance (e.g. Coflow Completion Time, or CCT). This work is described in:

Exploiting Inter-Flow Relationship for Coflow Placement in Datacenters

Xin Sunny Huang and T. S. Eugene Ng

In The First Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking (APNet 2017)

This repository contains a flow-level, discrete-event simulator, along with the tools necessary to replicate the experimental results reported in the paper.

How to run

The minimal working set is in src/, with a CMakeList to build the simulator binary. You can start the simulator with

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../src/
make
./Ximulator 

In this way, the simulator does require CMake to build the binary. You may also write your own Makefile to bypass CMake.

Take a look at main.cc for the flag options that you may want to reconfigure. For example, to play with a specific scheduler, use

./Ximulator -s varysImpl 

Output / Logging

The simulator is originally designed to dump all performance metrics (e.g. CCTs) into an external database for data analysis. However, database connection requires installing new library and driver. To remove such dependency and allow quick compilation on any machine, I remove or comment out code that relies on database connection. Instead of writing metrics to database, you may also write out to a file. Please refer to to db_logger.{h, cc} for more details.

IDE

This whole package works with CLion, so it comes with lots of CMakeLists.txt. To use IDE which may have a different directory for the binary other than src/, you may want to reconfigure the MAC_BASE_DIR in global.cc, to help the binary to find out the correct directory for input and output files. For details, take a look at global.cc.

I have provided simple tests for different components under tests/test_src/. You might want to begin with the tests for all schedulers in ximulator_test.cc. Our tests requires GoogleTest as a submodule. Run the following command to download the GoogleTest library to compile the test binaries.

cd tests/test_lib
git submodule init
git submodule update 

Then you may compile the tests as well as the simulator binaries using the CMakeLists.txt in the root directory.

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../
make

Try to find the test binaries under subdirectory build/tests. To run the test, you may also need to reconfigure MAC_BASE_DIR in ximulator_test_base.h, so as to help the IDE to find the tests and the necessary input or output files. Due to randomization in the simulation, the tests may fail when running in a different environment.

Trace

The Coflow trace comes from the popular coflow-benchmark by Mosharaf Chowdhury, with minor reformatting.

History

This simulator is developed over our previous open-sourced simulator for the Sunflow project. However, each simulator is designed to run independently on its own. Besides, the 2D-Placement simulator only partially overlaps with the Sunflow simulator because we keep finding new ways to optimize our code and workflow. :)