What is Cloudsim?

CloudSim is a simulation toolkit that supports the modeling and simulation of the core functionality of cloud, like job/task queue, processing of events, creation of cloud entities(datacenter, datacenter brokers, etc), communication between different entities, implementation of broker policies, etc. This toolkit allows to:

• Test application services in a repeatable and controllable environment.
• Tune the system bottlenecks before deploying apps in an actual cloud.
• Experiment with different workload mix and resource performance scenarios on simulated infrastructure for developing and testing adaptive application provisioning techniques

Core features of CloudSim are:

• The Support of modeling and simulation of large scale computing environment as federated cloud data centers, virtualized server hosts, with customizable policies for provisioning host resources to virtual machines and energy-aware computational resources
• It is a self-contained platform for modeling cloud’s service brokers, provisioning, and allocation policies.
• It supports the simulation of network connections among simulated system elements.
• Support for simulation of federated cloud environment, that inter-networks resources from both private and public domains.
• Availability of a virtualization engine that aids in the creation and management of multiple independent and co-hosted virtual services on a data center node.
• Flexibility to switch between space shared and time shared allocation of processing cores to virtualized services.

Is Cloudsim suitable for my research work?

This simulation toolkit is an API that allows a developer to run any server hardware model as a software simulation, to analyze its behavior for real-world workloads. Therefore it is clear that it allows as a researcher to simulate the Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) layer. This includes software models of data centers, hosts, storage, virtual machines, Cloud datacenter brokers, allocation & scheduling policies for the virtual machines as well as tasks, power management policies including migrations and consolidation of the virtual machines over different hosts, defining the workload attributes for its execution simulation over the cloud systems, etc.

It is not applicable/suitable where you are looking to analyze any service related to Platform as a Service(PaaS) or Software as a Service(SaaS) for example real-time applications, security algorithms, platform implementations, etc

Does it require a High computing system?

No, not at all. The cloudsim is a software simulation toolkit and is developed using Java programming language, Therefore, any computer system with a dual-core processor, 2 GB RAM, and 1 GB storage is good enough to simulate the cloud-based systems using the cloudsim as this is required to support the JRE working. Also, the hardware requirements may differ on the basis of which IDE you are using for JAVA development.

How to download Cloudsim?

Cloudsim project source code, as well as compiled jars files, are published through the GitHub project page: https://github.com/Cloudslab/cloudsim. By default, the project page displays the source code(based on maven build tool) of the current release, which is currently released version 5.0(beta) and the page displays the basic information about the project along with the publication details. Now if you are interested in using the previous versions of this project then you have click on releases link option available on project main page or otherwise, you may access it directly from the following links:

• Release Version 5.0
• Release Version 4.0
• Release Version 3.0.3
• Release Version 3.0.2
• Release Version 3.0.1
• Release Version 3.0
• Release Version 2.1.1
• Release Version 2.1

Every version except 5.0(still under development) contains 4 asset files example description for each asset file is as follows:

• cloudsim-4.0.tar.gz: This file contains the compiled JAR file that can be directly used into the custom simulation implementation where there is no need to change in the source code of cloudsim simulation engine. This version is Linux specific.
• cloudsim-4.0.zip: This is the same as above the only difference is that it is windows specific.
• Source code(zip): This file contains the complete source code of the cloudsim simulation framework project. As the cloudsim uses the maven build tool for its DevOps. Therefore to set up this project you require to use an IDE that supports maven project imports. How do you identify that its a maven based project? you will find a “pom.xml” file in the project root folder. This zip is windows operating system specific file.
• Source code(tar.gz): This file contains a similar structure as mentioned above, but it is specific to Linux

How to install?

Cloudsim setup is very easy, for this you may follow the following link: cloudsim-setup-using-eclipse/. This link describes in detail all the steps that are required to successfully configure the Cloudsim 3.0.3 version. The cloudsim 3.0.3 version is best to start with that once you understand the basic working and architecture then you can move to any latest version.