Using GridSim Toolkit for Supercharging Grid Computing Education

Numerous research groups in universities, research labs, and industries around the world are now working on Computational Grids or simply Grids that enable aggregation of distributed resources for solving largescale data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. Several institutions and universities already started research and teaching programs on Grid computing as part of their parallel and distributed computing curriculum. The researchers and students interested in resource management and scheduling on Grid need a testbed infrastructure for implementing, testing, and evaluating their ideas. Students often do not have access to Grid testbeds and even if they have access, the testbed size is smaller and hence limiting their ability in testing their ideas for scalable performance and large-scale evaluation. Also, on real testbed it is impossible to explore large-scale application and resource scenarios involving multiple users interacting simultaneously. To addresses these problems, we have proposed and developed a Java-based Grid simulation toolkit, called GridSim. The toolkit, built on a basic discrete event simulation system, called JavaSim, provides facilities for modeling and simulating Grid resources (both time and space-shared high performance computers) and network connectivity with different capabilities and configurations. We have used GridSim toolkit to simulate Nimrod-G like Grid resource broker that supports deadline and budget constrained cost and time minimization scheduling algorithms.