SPLAY: Distributed Systems Evaluation Made Simple (or How to Turn Ideas into Live Systems in a Breeze)

This paper presents SPLAY, an integrated system that facilitates the design, deployment and testing of largescale distributed applications. Unlike existing systems, SPLAY covers all aspects of the development and evaluation chain. It allows developers to express algorithms in a concise, simple language that highly resembles pseudocode found in research papers. The execution environment has low overheads and footprint, and provides a comprehensive set of libraries for common distributed systems operations. SPLAY applications are run by a set of daemons distributed on one or several testbeds. They execute in a sandboxed environment that shields the host system and enables SPLAY to also be used on nondedicated platforms, in addition to classical testbeds like PlanetLab or ModelNet. A controller manages applications, offering multi-criterion resource selection, deployment control, and churn management by reproducing the system’s dynamics from traces or synthetic descriptions. SPLAY’s features, usefulness, performance and scalability are evaluated using deployment of representative experiments on PlanetLab and ModelNet clusters.