Section: New Results

Simulation and Optimization Tools

Participants : Olivier Dalle, Luc Hogie, Aurélien Lancin, Emilio Mancini, Juan-Carlos Maureira, Philippe Mussi, Van Dan Nguyen, Judicaël Ribault, Issam Tahiri.

The works related to simulation and optimization tools address two kinds of issues: issues related to the development of the tools and their associated methodology, and issues related to the use of these tools in order to investigate a particular problem or assess the performances or properties of a particular system.

Since 2005, Mascotte has been developing a discrete event simulation architecture, named OSA, whose aim is to investigate how new software engineering techniques, such as component-based frameworks or Aspect Oriented Programming can help improving the simulation methodology, especially in terms of software reuse [16] , [46] , [47] . After six years of research development, OSA entered in the process of being diffused in 2011. This process is supported by a two-year INRIA “Development Action” (ADT) funding. This first year was devoted to cleaning the code base and produce a public release with a significant effort placed on user documentation and tutorial (cf http://osa.inria.fr/ ).

Aside our efforts on the OSA project, we are strongly involved in the USS-SimGrid ANR funded project, whose aim is at developing an efficient simulation platform geared at Grid Computing and very large scale distributed computing architectures. In this project, we worked on two tasks:

• Monitoring and characterization of the workload of large scale distributed applications [68] ;

• Support for modeling Peer-to-peer applications in the SimGrid simulator (originally designed for modeling grid-computing platforms).

We also pursued our involvement in the Discrete Event Systems Specification (DEVS) standardization effort [81] , [82] . This formalism has reached a strong agreement amongst the community, but it still lacks implementation standard. Since OSA is aimed at providing better support for methodology, we consider necessary to support DEVS and participate to this effort. Our particular focus was on techniques and Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) for describing very large models of distributed applications [69] .

Regarding our works on simulation studies and application-oriented developments, this year was the conclusion of our effort on the Internet on Rails project [14] . In this project, we studied and designed, both by means of simulations and experimentations, a low cost communication architecture based on IEEE 802.11 WiFi to provide high quality Internet access onboard high speed trains.