With simulation software, Chief Information Officers (CIO) will be able to identify the “right” IT system for their business. Scientists at Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) demonstrate how this works at CeBIT (Hall 9, Stand D44). Their “Load Simulator” is a simple interactive tool to compare key characteristics of different database configurations. Developed at HPI, the solution realistically simulates how thousands of users enter and analyze data at the same time and executes this workload simultaneously on selected machine configurations. Several performance indicators can be tracked on display instruments, such as size, throughput and processing time of data as well as overall utilization of central processing units.
The “Load Simulator” from Potsdam compares, on one hand, the capability of a single high-performance computer, where all data reside in the memory, with a network of multiple smaller servers. Thus current and historical data is distributed along with data copies stored exclusively for read access. Both versions have the same core and memory capacity. The implementation of data copies and caching for total amounts can be added or switched off for performance comparison. In their research with experts from the SAP Group, HPI scientists found out that by division into current and historical data as well as use of multiple copies for read access, the deployment of multiple smaller servers increases both performance and reliability. Additionally, it lowers total system costs - in contrast to large high performance computers. In the future CIOs should be in a position in their own company to define workloads with the Load Simulator using their real, current company data for the database comparison.
