Verification and Performance Evaluation of Parallel Pipelined Communications Using Petri Nets

Abstract

The growing use of multiprocessing systems has given rise to the necessity of modeling, verifying, and evaluating their performance, in order to fully exploit hardware [9], [15], [16]. The Petri Net (PN) formalism is a suitable tool for modeling parallel systems, because of basic characteristics of these systems, like parallelism and process synchronization. The system under study can be evaluated by means of generating and analyzing a set of processes. In addition [11], the PN formalism allows the incorporation of more details of the real system into the model. Examples of such details include the study of contentions for shared resources (like memory) and the study of blocked processes. In this paper, PN are considered as a modeling framework to verify and study the performance of parallel pipelined communications. The main strength of the pipelines is that, if organized in a proper way, they lead to overlapping of computation, communication, and read/write costs that incur in parallel processing ([7], [1], [14]). The PN model presented in this paper, accurately captures the behavior of a pipeline based parallel communication system. The model considers parallelization, message scheduling, and message classification, while it is proven to be free of deadlocks and contentions. Also, the model is characterized by symmetry, and thus it can be extended for large and complex systems.