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.

The main page of the project is here: http://simgrid.gforge.inria.fr/.

Here is my blog where I speak of my work on SimGrid.

The reference publication about the project is the following: H. Casanova, A. Legrand and M. Quinson. SimGrid: a Generic Framework for Large-Scale Distributed Experimentations. In Conf. on Computer Modelling and Simulation, 2008.
Get it from here :   (6 pages)

Here is the SimGrid tutorial:   (130 pages)

My participation to SimGrid begun when I started a project called GRAS. It evolved since then (GRAS is now part of SimGrid), but I still keep some information about it on this page.

GRAS (for Grid Reality And Simulation or even Generally Recognized As Safe) is a framework allowing to develop distributed application possibly suited to complex and changing conditions (such as the ones experienced on the Grid) within the comfort of a simulator.

The code developed this way can then be deployed as a real application with no loss of performances (even with performances gain in most case), compared to classical communication layers. No user source code modification or even recompilation is necessary, you just have to linking it against another library of GRAS.

More details available from its documentation.

The framework itself is self-contained and induce no dependency on other library or environment on the generated programs.

It is now included in the SimGrid framework directly. You can get the lastest stable release of that software from here, or a development snapshot from here: simgrid-3.3.4-svn6907.tar.gz (3.2 Mb) . You can also go directly for the SVN release, following these instructions to fetch it, and that ones to compile it.

You can find more platform files from the Platform Description Archive. You may find on the PDA web page the Simulacrum tool to generate your own platforms. This is however quite possible that the version there gets outdated. Here is the lastest version I have: pda-090707.jar (1.5 Mb) .