Performance measures of the Ada Rendezvous

Abstract

The Ada Programming Language [ADA], was designed to meet the nee d for a standard computer programming language. Ada has the ability to take advantage of multiprocessor environments. One feature, known as th e rendezvous, allows tasks to synchronize in such a environment. In this paper, we will look at the performance of the Ada rendezvous in a two-processo r system.In a distributed Ada system, the rendezvous provides synchronize d communication between asynchronous tasks. A system of this sort woul d consist of at least two processors, each serving various tasks. Presently, th e performance behavior of tasks which synchronize and possibly communicat e are not widely known. Developers of concurrent Ada systems will need t o perform sensitivity studies of the Ada tasking environment to develo p efficient time-critical programs. Therefore, we will discuss Rendezvou s Response Time from the point of view of a sensitivity study. We will sho w generalized performance curves of the rendezvous along with commentary o n their performance elbows (or bottlenecks). Rendezvous Response Time will b e defined as the amount of time one task must wait until its rendezvous request t o another task is completed. The discussion will be based on two separat e computer simulations of a two-processor system. The tools to be used to build these simulations are [ELSIR] and [APOSL].