A Network Simulation Tool for Task Scheduling

Abstract

Distributed computing may be looked at from many points of view. Task scheduling is the viewpoint, where a distributed application can be described as a Directed Acyclic Graph and every node of the graph is executed independently. There are, however, data dependencies and the nodes have to be executed in a specified order. Hence the parallelism of the execution is limited. The scheduling problem is difficult and therefore heuristics are used. However, many inaccuracies are caused by the model used for the system, in which the heuristics are being tested. In this paper we present a tool for simulating the execution of the distributed application on a “real” computer network, and try to tell how the executionis influenced compared to the model.