The LHCb Grid Simulation: Proof of Concept

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid provides access to data and computational resources to analyze it for researchers with different geographical locations. The grid has a hierarchical topology with multiple sites distributed over the world with varying number of CPUs, amount of disk storage and connection bandwidth. Job scheduling and data distribution strategy are key elements of grid performance. Optimization of algorithms for those tasks requires their testing on real grid which is hard to achieve. Having a grid simulator might simplify this task and therefore lead to more optimal scheduling and data placement algorithms. In this paper we demonstrate a grid simulator for the LHCb distributed computing software. (paper)