A distributed application level workload generator
Christopher Mueller · UVic’s Research and Learning Repository (University of Victoria) · 2009
Developing a capacity to test distributed systems hinges on being able to generate, in real-time, the workloads that these systems are to process, inclusive of the capability to sweep through various workload characteristics, as required to support sensitivity and robustness analyses. Currently, the majority of prior work in this area has focused on the re-production of workload traces at the network-level, e.g., Harpoon, ns-2, OpNet, tcpreplay, etc., whereas for many distributed systems reproducing application-level workload characteristics can be more informative from the testing perspective. This work details the development of an MPI-based application-level workload generation tool that scales to using multiple machines to re-create complex multi-homed workloads. The tool supports the standard abilities to produce both statistically described workloads as well as re-instantiating previously captured workload traces. Unlike prior tools, the contents of the payloads themselves can be varied as part of the workload generation process in a manner that allows the production of both stateless and stateful application-level workloads. The tool has been structured with the intent of supporting the needs of larger scale emulation-based testing environments.