Simulation of heterogeneous networks of workstations

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. I 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