PriDynSim: A Simulator for Dynamic Priority Based I/O Scheduling for Cloud Applications

Cloud computing facilitates flexible on-demand provisioning of IT resources over the Internet. It has proven to be very advantageous for a wide range of industries in the emerging markets by allowing them to match the infrastructure capabilities of their already established competitors. However, Cloud computing also poses several unique challenges in terms of resource allocation and scheduling. In particular, I/O bound applications have been mostly neglected in the research efforts in the area. Simulation tools play a key role in the evaluation of new resource management policies by providing an affordable and replicable testing environment. In this paper, we propose a novel simulation framework PriDynSim for priority based I/O policies, which manage the available resources to ensure adequate performance in the presence of deadline constraints. In a case study, we demonstrate how PriDynSim can be used to evaluate a resource management policy, which guarantees Quality of Service (QoS) for I/O bound applications running in a typical Cloud environment