Performance engineering is a fast-moving field where advances in technology mean that new issues constantly need to be addressed. In response to this, the UK Computer and Telecommunications Performance Engineering workshops were set up in 1985 to provide a valuable opportunity for the discussion and exchange of ideas. They have subsequently become well established as the focus for academic and industrial practitioners from the UK and Europe with an interest in performance and modelling and analysis. This volume contains the 16 papers which were presented at the 7th annual workshop, held in Edinburgh in July 1991. The workshop highlighted various aspects of parallel computing - an area which is attracting an increasing amount of interest - and the work presented in these papers is of particular interest as the contributors used real analysis to evaluate their models. The papers cover an unusually wide range of topics, both practical and theoretical, including advances in queueing theory, common performance problems and their solutions, assessments of available tools and presentations of new theoretical results. The result is an extremely comprehensive coverage of this important and challenging field. This volume provides an up-to-date assessment of work being carried out by performance engineers in the UK and Europe and will be an invaluable reference book for researchers and practitioners wishing to familiarise themselves with the benefits of performance and analysis.

Inhalt

The Performance Analysis Process.- A Statistical Approach to Finding Performance Models of Parallel Programs.- A Modelling Environment for Studying the Performance of Parallel Programs.- On the Performance Prediction of PRAM Simulating Models.- General Queueing Network Models with Variable Concurrent Programming Structures and Synchronisation.- Experiences in Implementing Solution Techniques for Networks of Queues.- BCMP Queueing Networks versus Stochastic Petri Nets: A Pragmatic Comparison.- Extension to Preemption of a Method for a Feedback Queue.- Approximate Analysis of a G/G/c/PR Queue.- The CLOWN Network Simulator.- Modelling ATM Network Components with the Process Interaction Tool.- Asynchronous Packet-switched Banyan Networks with Blocking (Extended Abstract).- Equilibrium Point Analysis of a Slotted Ring.- MEM for Arbitrary Exponential Open Networks with Blocking and Multiple Job Classes.- Performance Evaluation of FDDI by Emulation.- An Editing and Checking Tool for Stochastic Petri Nets.- Author Index.