METRICS

We consider an important tradeoff between processor and memory allocation in distributed parallel processing systems. To study this tradeoff, we formulate stochastic models of parallel program behavior, distributed parallel processing environments and ...

When multiple jobs compete for processing resources on a parallel computer, the operating system kernel's processor allocation policy determines how many and which processors to allocate to each. In this paper we investigate the issues involved in ...

The performance potential of run-to-completion (RTC) parallel processor scheduling policies is investigated by examining whether (1) application execution rate characteristics such as average parallelism (avg) and processor working set (PWS) and/or (2) ...

There has been a good deal of progress made recently towards the efficient parallelization of individual phases of single queries in multiprocessor database systems. In this paper we devise and evaluate a number of scheduling algorithms designed to ...

The join of two relations is an important operation in database systems. It occurs frequently in relational queries, and join performance is a significant factor in overall system performance. Cost models for join algorithms are used by query optimizers ...

The performance of a transaction processing system is very sensitive to the buffer hit probability. In a data sharing environment where multiple computing nodes are coupled together with direct access to shared data on disks, buffer coherency needs to ...

Stochastic Rendezvous Networks (SRVNs) are performance models for multitasking parallel software with intertask communication via rendezvous introduced in [1], which are very appropriate to model client-server systems. SRVNs differ from Queueing ...

We consider a particular class of Stochastic Petri Nets whose stationary probabilities at arbitrary instants exhibit a product form. We study these nets at specific instants in the steady state that occur directly after the firing of a transition. We ...

Most reliability analysis techniques and tools assume that a system is used for a mission consisting of a single phase. However, multiple phases are natural in many missions. The failure rates of components, system configuration, and success criteria ...

SynRGen, a synthetic file reference generator operating at the system call level, is capable of modeling a wide variety of usage environments. It achieves realism through trace-inspired micromodels and flexibility by combining these micromodels ...

Any performance evaluation study requires a concise description of the workload under which the performance of the system is to be evaluated. Also, the repeatability of the experiments for different workload profiles, requires that the workload models ...

Tracing tools are used widely to help analyze, design, and tune both hardware and software systems. This paper describes a tool called Shade which combines efficient instruction-set simulation with a flexible, extensible trace generation capability. ...

In this paper we present results from a six-month empirical study of the high availability aspects of the Coda File System. We report on the service failures experienced by Coda clients, and show that such failures are masked successfully. We also ...

Current network file system protocols rely heavily on a central server to coordinate file activity among client workstations. This central server can become a bottleneck that limits scalability for environments with large numbers of clients. In central ...

Trends toward shared-memory programming paradigms, large (64-bit) address spaces, and memory-mapped files have led some to propose the use of a single virtual-address space, shared by all processes and processors. Typical proposals require the single ...

The overheads in a parallel system that limit its scalability need to be identified and separated in order to enable parallel algorithm design and the development of parallel machines. Such overheads may be broadly classified into two components. The ...

This paper describes our experience in modeling two significant parallel applications: ARC2D, a 2-dimensional Euler solver; and, Xtrid, a tridiagonal linear solver. Both of these models were expressed in BDL (Behavior Description language) and simulated ...

A new iterative algorithm, the multi-level algorithm, for the numerical solution of steady state Markov chains is presented. The method utilizes a set of recursively coarsened representations of the original system to achieve accelerated convergence. It ...

It is widely believed that Time Warp is prone to two potential problems: an excessive amount of wasted, rolled back computation resulting from “rollback thrashing” behaviors, and inefficient use of memory, leading to poor performance of virtual memory ...

This paper demonstrates a new, efficient, and general approach for providing end-to-end performance guarantees in integrated services networks. This is achieved by modeling a traffic source with a family of bounding interval-dependent (BIND) random ...

Sender-initiated reliable multicast protocols, based on the use of positive acknowledgments (ACKs), lead to an ACK implosion problem at the sender as the number of receivers increases. Briefly, the ACK implosion problem refers to the significant ...

The multiplexing of several lightly loaded links onto a more heavily loaded output link is a problem of considerable importance to the design and traffic engineering of many types of packet-oriented telecommunications equipment, including that used in ...

Disk subsystem performance can be dramatically improved by dynamically ordering, or scheduling, pending requests. Via strongly validated simulation, we examine the impact of complex logical-to-physical mappings and large prefetching caches on scheduling ...

The complete-exchange communication primitive on a distributed memory multiprocessor calls for every processor to send a message to every other processor, each such message being unique. For circuit-switched hypercube networks there are two well-known ...

The impact of cache interferences on program performance (particularly numerical codes, which heavily use the memory hierarchy) remains unknown. The general knowledge is that cache interferences are highly irregular, in terms of occurrence and ...