Samee U. Khan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and colleagues P. Bouvry and D. Kliazovich from the University of Luxembourg have released under the General Public License Agreement a sophisticated cloud computing simulator called GreenCloud.

According to Khan, the lack of detailed simulators on the market was the motivation to develop GreenCloud that allows researchers to observe, interact and measure cloud performance. There also was no provisioning for observing clouds for their energy-efficiency.

GreenCloud is an extension of the well-known NS2 network simulator. It is focused primarily on the communications within a cloud, i.e., all of the communication processes are simulated on packet level. About 80 percent of GreenCloud code is implemented in C++ while the remaining 20 percent is in the form of Tool Command Language scripts.

GreenCloud can be downloaded at https://gforge.uni.lu/projects/greencloud.