Predicting Performance on a Loosely Controlled Event System

We contend that event systems will become the kernel of distributed middleware for multicore systems due to their asynchronous nature. In a concurrent system, the fewer points of synchronization between independent activities, the better the achievable parallelization. As physical devices are integrated into distributed middleware the timeliness of the execution of functions becomes increasingly important. Precise guarantees require complete control of all the elements which influence the execution. However, the purpose of middleware is to abstract from the exact nature of the underlying platform. Here we outline an approach that allocates processor shares to event queues, thus controlling the rate of events handled at any given queue. We show how this in turn allows us to predict the likely throughput through a queue. This prediction is achieved through model fitting and calibration.