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Issue No.01 - Jan. (2013 vol.39)
pp: 97-118
Richard A. Hayden , Imperial College London, London
Jeremy T. Bradley , Imperial College London, London
Allan Clark , University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
ABSTRACT
Rapid and accessible performance evaluation of complex software systems requires two critical features: the ability to specify useful performance metrics easily and the capability to analyze massively distributed architectures, without recourse to large compute clusters. We present the unified stochastic probe, a performance specification mechanism for process algebra models that combines many existing ideas: state and action-based activation, location-based specification, many-probe specification, and immediate signaling. These features, between them, allow the precise and compositional construction of complex performance measurements. The paper shows how a subset of the stochastic probe language can be used to specify common response-time measures in massive process algebra models. The second contribution of the paper is to show how these response-time measures can be analyzed using so-called fluid techniques to produce rapid results. In doing this, we extend the fluid approach to incorporate immediate activities and a new type of response-time measure. Finally, we calculate various response-time measurements on a complex distributed wireless network of O(10^{129}) states in size.
INDEX TERMS
Probes, Stochastic processes, Analytical models, Algebra, Computational modeling, Semantics, Syntactics, passage-time analysis, Performance modeling, performance evaluation tools, stochastic process algebra, measurement probes, fluid approximation
CITATION
Richard A. Hayden, Jeremy T. Bradley, Allan Clark, "Performance Specification and Evaluation with Unified Stochastic Probes and Fluid Analysis", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol.39, no. 1, pp. 97-118, Jan. 2013, doi:10.1109/TSE.2012.1
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