Richard Hayden, Jeremy T. Bradley, A Clark
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 analyse 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 signalling. 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 analysed 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.
Submitted 14 August 2010. Revised 24 October 2011. Accepted 24 December 2011.
PDF of full publication (3.3 megabytes)Information from pubs.doc.ic.ac.uk/fluid-unified-stochastic-probes.