HolDCSim: A Holistic Simulator for Data Centers*

Abstract

A comprehensive data center simulation infrastructure, which models major hardware and system components and offers interfaces to manage the interplay between computation and communication resources, is critical in advancing future research for more effective performance and energy optimization in these environments. In this paper, we present HolDCSim, a light-weight, holistic, extensible, event-driven data center simulation platform that effectively models both server and network architectures. HolDCSim can be used in a variety of data center system studies including job/task scheduling, resource provisioning, global and local server farm power management, and performance analysis. We demonstrate the design of our simulation infrastructure, and illustrate the usefulness of our framework with a case study that analyzes server-network performance and energy efficiency. We also perform validation studies for our simulator on a physical testbed with Intel Xeon-based processors and Cisco network switches.