+% SimGrid~\cite{SimGrid,casanova+legrand+quinson.2008.simgrid,casanova+giersch+legrand+al.2014.versatile}
+% is a simulation framework to study the behavior of large-scale distributed
+% systems. As its name suggests, it emanates from the grid computing community,
+% but is nowadays used to study grids, clouds, HPC or peer-to-peer systems. The
+% early versions of SimGrid date back from 1999, but it is still actively
+% developed and distributed as an open source software. Today, it is one of the
+% major generic tools in the field of simulation for large-scale distributed
+% systems.
+
+SimGrid provides several programming interfaces: MSG to simulate Concurrent
+Sequential Processes, SimDAG to simulate DAGs of (parallel) tasks, and SMPI to
+run real applications written in MPI~\cite{MPI}. Apart from the native C
+interface, SimGrid provides bindings for the C++, Java, Lua and Ruby programming
+languages. SMPI is the interface that has been used for the work described in
+this paper. The SMPI interface implements about \np[\%]{80} of the MPI 2.0
+standard~\cite{bedaride+degomme+genaud+al.2013.toward}, and supports
+applications written in C or Fortran, with little or no modifications (cf Section IV - paragraph B).
+
+Within SimGrid, the execution of a distributed application is simulated by a
+single process. The application code is really executed, but some operations,
+like communications, are intercepted, and their running time is computed
+according to the characteristics of the simulated execution platform. The
+description of this target platform is given as an input for the execution, by
+means of an XML file. It describes the properties of the platform, such as
+the computing nodes with their computing power, the interconnection links with
+their bandwidth and latency, and the routing strategy. The scheduling of the
+simulated processes, as well as the simulated running time of the application
+are computed according to these properties.
+
+To compute the durations of the operations in the simulated world, and to take
+into account resource sharing (e.g. bandwidth sharing between competing
+communications), SimGrid uses a fluid model. This allows users to run relatively fast
+simulations, while still keeping accurate
+results~\cite{bedaride+degomme+genaud+al.2013.toward,
+ velho+schnorr+casanova+al.2013.validity}. Moreover, depending on the
+simulated application, SimGrid/SMPI allows to skip long lasting computations and
+to only take their duration into account. When the real computations cannot be
+skipped, but the results are unimportant for the simulation results, it is
+also possible to share dynamically allocated data structures between
+several simulated processes, and thus to reduce the whole memory consumption.
+These two techniques can help to run simulations on a very large scale.
+
+The validity of simulations with SimGrid has been asserted by several studies.
+See, for example, \cite{velho+schnorr+casanova+al.2013.validity} and articles
+referenced therein for the validity of the network models. Comparisons between
+real execution of MPI applications on the one hand, and their simulation with
+SMPI on the other hand, are presented in~\cite{guermouche+renard.2010.first,
+ clauss+stillwell+genaud+al.2011.single,
+ bedaride+degomme+genaud+al.2013.toward}. All these works conclude that
+SimGrid is able to simulate pretty accurately the real behavior of the
+applications.