Designing a parallel OGSSim through library specificities

Simulation is the most appropriate technique to evaluate the performance of current data storage systems and predict it for the future ones as part of data centers or cloud infrastructures. It assesses the potential of a system to meet the users requirements in terms of storage capacity, devices heterogeneity, delivered performance and robustness. We developed a simulation tool called OGSSim to address efficiently these criteria within a reduced execution time. But the number of threads on the test machine put an upper bound to the size of the simulated systems. To push this limitation and improve the simulation time, we define in this paper a parallel version of OGSSim. We explain how the parallelization process generate both design and implementation challenges due to the multi-node environment and the related communications and how MPI and ZeroMQ libraries respectively help us to address those challenges.