Paper Details

%T Performance Analysis and Behaviour Tuning for Optimisation of Communicating Systems
%A Mark Green, Ali E. Abdallah
%E James S. Pascoe, Roger J. Loader, Vaidy S. Sunderam
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2002
%X Improving performance is the main driving force behind the
   use of parallel systems. Models for performance evaluation
   and techniques for performance optimisation are crucial for
   effectively exploiting the computational power of parallel
   systems. This paper focuses on methods for evaluating the
   performance of parallel applications built from components
   using the software architecture methodology. Minor
   differences in the low\-level behaviour of functionally
   equivalent processing elements can have a dramatic effect
   upon the performance of the overall system; this confounds
   attempts to predict performance at any step prior to
   implementation. VisualNets is a tool supporting the
   construction and graphical manipulation of interacting
   systems built from components. It makes use of
   specifications in the formal method CSP, which enables the
   relevant component behaviours and the linkage between
   components to be concisely described. The tool allows the
   behaviour of the whole system over time, and the patterns of
   interaction between the components, to be visualised through
   graphical animation. The graphical display produced
   facilitates the analysis and evaluation of performance, and
   highlights areas where performance could be improved via
   better utilisation of parallel resources. VisualNets also
   allows the timing properties of the components and of the
   architecture that underlies them to be changed, to represent
   different component implementations or platform
   configurations. A case study, based on the dual pipeline
   architecture, is presented to show how the graphical
   animation capability of VisualNets can be used, firstly to
   evaluate performance, and secondly to guide the development
   of more efficient versions of the parallel system.

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