A survey of general-purpose experiment management tools for distributed systems

Tomasz Buchert (1) , Cristian Ruiz (2) , Lucas Nussbaum (1) , Olivier Richard (2)

1 MADYNES - Management of dynamic networks and services
2 MESCAL - Middleware efficiently scalable

In the field of large-scale distributed systems, experimentation is particularly difficult. The studied systems are complex, often nondeterministic and unreliable, software is plagued with bugs, whereas the experiment workflows are unclear and hard to reproduce. These obstacles led many independent researchers to design tools to control their experiments, boost productivity and improve quality of scientific results. Despite much research in the domain of distributed systems experiment management, the current fragmentation of efforts asks for a general analysis. We therefore propose to build a framework to uncover missing functionality of these tools, enable meaningful comparisons be-tween them and find recommendations for future improvements and research. The contribution in this paper is twofold. First, we provide an extensive list of features offered by general-purpose experiment management tools dedicated to distributed systems research on real platforms. We then use it to assess existing solutions and compare them, outlining possible future paths for improvements.

Mots clés: Reproducibility; Testbeds; Large-scale distributed systems; Control of experiments; Experimentation

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Tomasz Buchert, Cristian Ruiz, Lucas Nussbaum, Olivier Richard. A survey of general-purpose experiment management tools for distributed systems. Future Generation Computer Systems, 2015, 45, pp.1 - 12. ⟨10.1016/j.future.2014.10.007⟩. ⟨hal-01087519⟩