Performance Engineering with Product-form Models: Efficient Solutions and Applications Simonetta Balsamo Andrea Marin Dipartimento di Informatica Dipartimento di Informatica Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia via Torino, 155 via Torino, 155 Venice, Italy Venice, Italy
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Performance engineering plays a pivotal role in the success- Performance engineering plays a pivotal role in the soft- ful design of software system and the software development ware development process and the successful design of soft- process. Stochastic modelling has been widely applied to ware architectures [42], communication protocols, or hard- predict and evaluate or estimate system performance. We ware architectures all along the development process. Mod- consider the specification of models in terms of compositions elling is an important and useful approach for performance of simpler components and their efficient solution. Various evaluation and system validation and it can provide predic- formalisms or classes of stochastic models have been ap- tion and comparison of design alternatives. System perfor- plied for system performance engineering and evaluation. mance engineering deals with the representation and analy- These formalisms includes queueing networks, Stochastic sis of the system dynamic based on models to provide feed- Petri Nets, and Stochastic Process Algebras. Their dy- back in the system development process. In this context, namic behaviour can be usually represented by an under- stochastic modelling has been widely applied to evaluate or lying stochastic (Markov) process. For each formalism some estimate the performance of both software [8] and hardware classes of product-form models have been identified, start- architectures of computer systems.