A New Application of Machine Learning: Detecting Errors in Network Simulations

After designing a simulation and running it locally on a small network instance, the implementation can be scaled-up via parallel and distributed computing (e.g., a cluster) to cope with massive networks. However, implementation changes can create errors (e.g., parallelism errors), which are difficult to identify since the aggregate behavior of an incorrect implementation of a stochastic network simulation can fall within the distributions expected from correct implementations. In this paper, we propose the first approach that applies machine learning to traces of network simulations to detect errors. Our technique transforms simulation traces into images by reordering the network's adjacency matrix, and then training supervised machine learning models. Our evaluation on three simulation models shows that we can easily detect previously encountered types of errors and even confidently detect new errors. This work opens up numerous opportunities by examining other simulation models, representations (i.e., matrix reordering algorithms), or machine learning techniques.