Emulation platform for high accuracy failure injection in grids

In the process of developping grid applications, people need to often evaluate the robustness of their work. Two common approaches are, simulation where one can evaluates his software and predict behaviors under conditions usually unachievable in a laboratory experiment and experimentation where the actual application is launched on an actual grid. However simulation could ignore unpredictable behaviors due to the abstraction done and experimation does not guarantee a controlled and reproducible environment. In this chapter, we propose an emulation platform for parallel and distributed systems including grids where both the machines and the network are virtualized at a low level. The use of virtual machines allows us to test highly accurate failure injection since we can 'destroy' virtual machines and, network virtualization provides low-level network emulation. Failure accuracy is a criteria that notes how realistic a fault is. The accuracy of our framework is evaluated through a set of micro benchmarks and a very stable P2P system call Pastry since we are very interested in the publication system and resources finding of grid systems.