Using ZeroMQ as communication/synchronization mechanisms for IO requests simulation

Using simulation to study the behavior of large-scale data storage systems becomes capital to predict the performance and the reliability of any of them at a lower cost. This helps to take the right decisions before the system development and deployment. OGSSim is a simulation tool for large and heterogeneous storage systems that uses parallelism to provide informations about the behavior of such systems in a reduced time. It uses ZeroMQ communication library to implement not only the data communication but also the synchronization functions between the generated threads. These synchronization points occur during the requests parallel execution and need to be treated efficiently to ensure data coherency for the fast and accurate computation of performance metrics. In this work, different issues due to the parallel execution of our simulation tool OGSSim are presented and the adopted solutions using ZeroMQ are discussed. The impact of these solutions in term of simulation time overhead are measured considering various system configurations. The obtained results s how t hat ZeroMQ has almost no impact on the simulation time, even for complex and large configurations.