Performance evaluation and control of distributed systems (session overview)

Abstract

Distributed systems are modeled with three interesting techniques in the papers of this session. “A Task-partitioning Problem for a Distributed Real-time Control Data Processing System,” is presented by Shi, Hu and Wang, all of the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Miluzinovic, from Purdue, and Crnkovic, from the University of Miami, are the authors of “State Transition Times for Limited Access Contention Multiple Access Schemes.” “Performance Evaluation of Concurrent Systems using Timed Petri Nets” is the subject of Zuberek's paper. Zuberek is from the University of Newfoundland.Four major factors: 1) inteprocessor messages, 2) CPU rate, 3) memory capacity and 4) number of processors, are analyzed by Shi, Hu and Wang. Their examination leads to four partitioning principles which, in turn, are used to derive a model of partitioning. While confronting the typical computational intractable problems, the authors present a static algorithm for a good, if not optimal, partitioning.Milutinovic and Crnkovic examine limited contention schemes for bus topology local area networks. Limited contention schemes attempt to provide the advantages of both contention-based and conflict-free access strategies. Simulation results reported support the authors' recommendations for robust binary adaptive access schemes for certain applications.Performance of concurrent systems is modeled by Zuberek using m-timed Petri nets and the finite state Markov chains isomorphic to such nets. M-timed Petri nets are Petri nets with firing times are: 1) assigned to transitions and 2) are exponentially distributed random variables. An example application is presented by the author.