Presentation Transcript

1. Supporting Simulations on the Cloud using Workflows & Virtual Machines

   Gary Polhill Macaulay Land Use Research Institute Edoardo Pignotti Computing Science, University of Aberdeen
2. Overview The SwarmCloud project Social simulation & the Cloud A virtualised simulation environment Facilitating access with workflows Workflows on the Grid/Cloud Conclusions
3. The SwarmCloud Project Goal: to enable the FEARLUS simulation model to be run on National Grid Service infrastructure What’s so hard about that? FEARLUS is written in Obj-C for the Swarm libraries—notoriously difficult to install Numbers of pre-requisite libraries Can be sensitive to particular versions of libraries and Unix commands Typical Grid use-cases involve running a script e.g. Model calibration Other software environments for social simulation exhibit the same issues (barrier to adoption)
4. How can social simulation benefit from the Cloud? Enabling large-scale distributed simulations e.g. Fraser et al. (2009 Science), Birkin et al. (2009 SSCoRe), Tang & Bennett (2009 US-IALE) More challenging because of managing agent interactions across node boundaries Enabling multiple runs of smaller-scale models for: Exploring parameter space Experimenting with algorithmic variants Trying different scenarios Increasing sensitivity (more runs with different seeds) ‘Embarrassingly Parallel’
5. Swarm software dependencies shown ‘worst-case’ Java not immune Pre-requisite jars can be required (with version sensitivity) JRE version sensitivity Obvious problems for programs/libraries using JNI Software dependencies
6. The solution: A virtualised simulation environment: simulationBox We used a lightweight version of Centos 5.2 to create a virtualised simulation environment containing Swarm, MASON and RePast Compressed image ~1GB in size http://www.simulationbox.net/ The simulation environment was created using Sun’s VirtualBox virtualisation software Binaries available under a Personal Use and Evaluation Licence http://www.virtualbox.org/
7. Virtualisation on the Cloud The virtualisation approach relies on the Cloud host making virtualisation facilities available The National Grid Service is testing a virtualisation service based on Xen/EUCALYPTUS at Oxford Xen: Open Source standard for virtualisation http://www.xen.org/ EUCALYPTUS (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems): Open-source system for implementing clouds Provides an authentication layer, and manages virtual machines using ec2 tools http://www.eucalyptus.com/
8. Facilitating access: Workflows Virtualisation provides a replicable environment for compiling and running a social simulation ‘User interface’ not very friendly Access via ssh Kepler workflow tool used to design simulation experiments
9. Upper Deeside Case-study
10. Workflows on theCLOUD We have developed a number of Kepler workflow activities based on the ec2 tools: Authenticate a user on the Cloud Upload simulationBox to a node manager Create instances of simulationBox on the Cloud Query for available simulationBox instances on the Cloud Compile a new simulation model on a simulationBox instance Run the model multiple time across different VM instances Collect and analyse results, saving them on the local machine Our Kepler libraries can be downloaded from www.simulationbox.net
11. Compile a simulation model
12. Run an experiment
13. Conclusions For Cloud infrastructure supplying virtualisation services it is possible to run social simulations with specific computing requirements Access is facilitated through workflows that can be shared amongst people Website: www.simulationbox.net ESSA 2009 Tutorial on simulationBox Large Scale Social Simulation Special Interest Group (ESSA) SwarmFest 2010