Defining and controlling the heterogeneity of a cluster: The Wrekavoc tool

The experimental validation and the testing of solutions that are designed for heterogeneous environments are challenging. We introduce Wrekavoc as an accurate tool for this purpose: it runs unmodified applications on emulated multi-site heterogeneous platforms. Its principal technique consists in downgrading the performance of the platform characteristics in a prescribed way. The platform characteristics include the compute nodes themselves (CPU and memory) and the interconnection network for which a controlled overlay network above the homogeneous cluster is built. In this article we describe the tool, its performance, its accuracy and its scalability. Results show that Wrekavoc is a very versatile tool that is useful to perform high-quality experiments (in terms of reproducibility, realism, control, etc.).