EHGRID: An emulator of heterogeneous computational grids

Heterogeneous distributed computing is found in a variety of fields including scientific computing, Internet and mobile devices. Computational grids focusing primarily on computationally-intensive operations have emerged as a new infrastructure for high performance computing. Specific algorithms such as scheduling, load balancing and data redistribution have been devised to overcome the limitations of these systems and take full advantage of their processing power. However, experimental validation and fine-tuning of such algorithms require multiple heterogeneous platforms and configurations. We present EHGRID, a computational grid emulator based on the heterogeneous emulator Wrekavoc. EHGRID reshapes the virtual topology of a homogeneous cluster, degrades the performance of the processors and modifies the characteristics of the network links in an accurate, independent and reproducible way. We demonstrate its utility using two parallel matrix-vector programs and selected NAS parallel benchmarks on a series of four emulated grids.