  Cloud computing based systems, that span data centers, are commonly deployed
to offer high performance for user service requests. As data centers continue
to expand, computer architects and system designers are facing many challenges
on how to balance resource utilization efficiency, server and network
performance, energy consumption and quality-of-service (QoS) demands from the
users. To develop effective data center management policies, it becomes
essential to have an in-depth understanding and synergistic control of the
various sub-components inside large scale computing systems, that include both
computation and communication resources. In this paper, we propose HolDCSim, a
light-weight, holistic, extensible, event-driven data center simulation
platform that effectively models both server and network architectures.
HolDCSim can be used in a variety of data center system studies including
job/task scheduling, resource provisioning, global and local server farm power
management, and network and server performance analysis. We demonstrate the
design of our simulation infrastructure, and illustrate the usefulness of our
framework with several case studies that analyze server/network performance and
energy efficiency. We also perform validation on real machines to verify our
simulator.
