A comparative analysis of energy consumption and carbon emissions of CloudSim, CloudAnalyst and CloudReports cloud simulators.

The technological advances, popularity and complexity of cloud computing systems make the need for cloud simulators evident. Cloud simulators are programs that simulate a real datacenter into your personal computer. Their main objective is evaluating the infrastructure, trying different configurations to find the best one and provide more energy-efficient solutions. By doing all these assessments, these programs consume energy and produce emissions. This paper studies the energy consumption of three Java based simulators respectively CloudSim, Cloud Analyst and CloudReports. All of these applications are extensions of CloudSim and are event oriented. To analyze and achieve a conclusion, descriptive, and inferential statistics are implemented on the data gathered from Joulemeter measurements. According to the results of this experimental study, by conducting the deployments of the same infrastructure, CloudReports is found to consume more energy and produce more carbon emissions compared to the other two programs. This is related to the complete graphical user interface it provides. However, it should be noted that CloudSim consumes almost 9 times less energy and has a command line interface.