SimGrid  3.8.1
Scalable Simulation of Distributed Systems - Reference Manual
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SimGrid Reference Manual
SimGrid - Scalable simulation of distributed systems, ranging from grids to peer-to-peer systems

SimGrid Reference Guide

Welcome to the SimGrid Reference Guide. This guide contains a detailed list of functions, macros and structs provided by SimGrid. This guide is supposed to help you to code your simulator using SimGrid primitives, so it means that you already know the basics of SimGrid, have it installed and so on. If not, please refer either to the SimGrid user guide or to the various tutorials available either online or in the relevant doc section.

SimGrid ?

SimGrid is a toolkit that provides core functionalities for the simulation of distributed applications in heterogeneous distributed environments.

The specific goal of the project is to facilitate research in the area of distributed and parallel application scheduling on distributed computing platforms ranging from simple network of workstations to Computational Grids.

Overview of the toolkit components

As depicted by the following diagram, the SimGrid toolkit is basically three-layered (click on the picture to jump to a specific component).

TRACE Contrib SimDag SMPI GRAS MSG SMPI AMOK XBT
Relationships between the SimGrid components (click to jump to API)

Programmation environments layer

SimGrid provides several programmation environments built on top of a unique simulation kernel. Each environment targets a specific audiance and constitutes a different paradigm. To choose which of them you want to use, you have to think about what you want to do and what would be the result of your work.

  • If you want to study a theoritical problem and compare several heuristics, you probably want to try MSG (yet another historical name). It was designed exactly to that extend and should allow you to build easily rather realistic multi-agents simulation. Yet, realism is not the main goal of this environment and the most annoying technical issues of real platforms are masked here. Check the MSG section for more information.
  • If you want to study the behaviour of a MPI application using emulation technics, you should have a look at the SMPI (Simulated MPI) programming environment. Unfortunately, this work is still underway. Check the SMPI section for more information.
  • If you want to develop a real distributed application, then you may find GRAS (Grid Reality And Simulation) useful. This is an API for the realization of distributed applications.

    Moreover, there is two implementations of this API: one on top of the SURF (allowing to develop and test your application within the comfort of the simulator) and another suited for deployment on real platforms (allowing the resulting application to be highly portable and extremely efficient).

    Even if you do not plan to run your code for real, you may want to switch to GRAS if you intend to use MSG in a very intensive way (e.g. for simulating a peer-to-peer environment).

    See the GRAS section for more details.

If your favorite programming environment/model is not there (BSP, components, OpenMP, etc.) is not represented in the SimGrid toolkit yet, you may consider adding it. You should contact us first on the SimGrid developers mailing list, though.

Simulation kernel layer

The core functionnalities to simulate a virtual platform are provided by a module called SURF. It is very low-level and is not intended to be used as such by end-users. Instead, it serve as a basis for the higher level layer.

SURF main features are a fast max-min linear solver and the ability to change transparently the model used to describe the platform. This greatly eases the comparison of the several models existing in the litterature.

See the SURF section for more details.

Base layer

The base of the whole toolkit is constituted by the XBT (eXtended Bundle of Tools).

It is a portable library providing some grounding features such as Logging support, Exception support and Configuration support. XBT also encompass the following convenient datastructures: Dynar: generic dynamic array, Fifo: generic workqueue, Dict: generic dictionnary, Heap: generic heap data structure, Set: generic set datatype and Swag: O(1) set datatype.

See the XBT section for more details.

Tracing simulation

Finally, a transversal module allows you to trace your simulation. More documentation in the section TRACE documentation


The SimGrid software package can be downloaded from here.
If you are interested in the history of SimGrid and in current and planned development, you can find out more here. Any question, remark or suggestion are welcome on the SimGrid users mailing list.
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