An approach to workload generation for modern data centers: A view from Alibaba trace

Modern data centers provide the foundational infrastructure of cloud computing. Workload generation, which involves simulating or constructing tasks and transactions to replicate the actual resource usage patterns of real-world systems or applications, plays essential role for efficient resource management in these centers. Data center traces, rich in information about workload execution and resource utilization, are thus ideal data for workload generation. Traditional traces provide detailed temporal resource usage data to enable fine-grained workload generation. However, modern data centers tend to favor tracing statistical metrics to reduce overhead. Therefore the accurate reconstruction of temporal resource consumption without detailed, temporized trace information become a major challenge for trace-based workload generation. To address this challenge, we propose STWGEN, a novel method that leverages statistical trace data for workload generation. STWGEN is specifically designed to generate the batch task workloads based on Alibaba trace. STWGEN contains two key components: a suite of C program-based flexible workload building blocks and a heuristic strategy to assemble building blocks for workload generation. Both components are carefully designed to reproduce synthetic batch tasks that closely replicate the observed resource usage patterns in a representative data center. Experimental results demonstrate that STWGEN outperforms state-of-the-art workload generation methods as it emulates workload-level and machine-level resource usage in much higher accuracy.