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iCanCloud: A Flexible and Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Simulator

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Abstract

Simulation techniques have become a powerful tool for deciding the best starting conditions on pay-as-you-go scenarios. This is the case of public cloud infrastructures, where a given number and type of virtual machines (in short VMs) are instantiated during a specified time, being this reflected in the final budget. With this in mind, this paper introduces and validates iCanCloud, a novel simulator of cloud infrastructures with remarkable features such as flexibility, scalability, performance and usability. Furthermore, the iCanCloud simulator has been built on the following design principles: (1) it’s targeted to conduct large experiments, as opposed to others simulators from literature; (2) it provides a flexible and fully customizable global hypervisor for integrating any cloud brokering policy; (3) it reproduces the instance types provided by a given cloud infrastructure; and finally, (4) it contains a user-friendly GUI for configuring and launching simulations, that goes from a single VM to large cloud computing systems composed of thousands of machines.

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Correspondence to Alberto Núñez.

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Núñez, A., Vázquez-Poletti, J.L., Caminero, A.C. et al. iCanCloud: A Flexible and Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Simulator. J Grid Computing 10, 185–209 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-012-9208-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-012-9208-5

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