A first step to the evaluation of SimGrid in the context of a real application

Simulation is a ¿simple¿ method to experimentally evaluate the behavior of algorithms designed for parallel and distributed platforms. Moreover, the reliability of the evaluation strongly depends on the models used inside the simulator. This paper is devoted to the study and the evaluation of the behavior of the SimGrid simulator through a comparison between a simulated and a real execution of the same target application (i.e. heat propagation). Our target platforms are heterogeneous and their characteristics may dynamically vary during the execution. The obtained results (on a set of various platforms) show that the behavior observed when using the simulated platform is very close to the one obtained on the real one.