Digital Video Cluster
Simulation
Martin N. Milkovits (SeaChange International)
Abstract:
The advent of Video On Demand (VOD) services is made
possible by specialized high performance, high reliability computer systems.
These systems must maintain the constant bandwidth required by video and
guarantee fault resiliency. SeaChange®’s digital video system meets the VOD
challenges with a scalable cluster solution using a patented data distribution
algorithm for efficient data redundancy. The SeaChange digital video cluster
incorporates several different bus and fabric technologies to deliver high
performance and data reliability. But, the existence of many data paths and
congestion scenarios make it difficult to determine the maximum performance
of, or bottlenecks in, the system. Therefore, a simulation model to represent
the internal fabric of a VOD cluster from SeaChange is designed, implemented
and verified.
Realistic Internet Traffic Simulation Through Mixture
Modeling and a Case Study
Song Luo (University of Central Florida)
and Gerald A. Marin (Florida Institute of Technology)
Abstract:
Internet background traffic modeling and simulation is
the main challenge when constructing a test environment for network intrusion
detection experiments. However, a realistic simulation of network traffic
through analytical models is difficult, because the classic distributions are
usually ineffective when applied to traffic-related random variables. A
modeling and simulation approach using heavy-tailed mixture distributions is
introduced in this paper. In the case study, this approach is used to build
analytical models for random variables of several major Internet applications
(FTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP3, SSH) of a campus network. Several statistical features
of an NS2 simulation are compared against those of the traffic traces being
simulated. The comparison indicates that the simulation is statistically
similar to the real traffic.
Component-Based Performance Modeling of a
Storage Area Network
Nava Aizikowitz, Alex Glikson, Ariel Landau,
Bilha Mendelson, and Tommy Sandbank (IBM Haifa Research Lab)
Abstract:
This work explores performance issues of system-level
interactions by means of performance modeling. We focus on I/O performance in
a storage area network (SAN), namely, the performance of I/O interactions of
host servers and storage subsystems via the SAN fabric. We present a
component-based simulation performance model, which supports a rich variety of
both existing and future storage subsystems, allows for some basic network
configurations, and addresses the major I/O aspects of the server operating
system. The model's flexibility allows for easy parameter modifications,
configuration adjustments, architecture manipulations, and experimentation.
The experiments presented in this paper demonstrate some of the ways this
model can be utilized, such as data placement, I/O manipulation, and the
evaluation of execution alternatives, and shows the types of performance
insights that may be gained.
