Performance analysis of a system of communicating processes

Efficient exploration of the system design space necessitates fast and accurate performance estimation as opposed to the computationally prohibitive alternative of exhaustive simulation. The paper addresses the issue of worst case performance analysis of a system described as a set of concurrent communicating processes. We show that the synchronization overhead associated with inter process communication can contribute significantly to the overall system performance. Application of existing performance analysis techniques, which target single process descriptions, lead to inaccurate performance estimates as the synchronization overhead is not accounted for. We present PERC, a fast and accurate worst case performance analysis technique which analyzes inter process communication, and accounts for synchronization overhead while computing the worst case performance estimate of a given system implementation. Application of PERC to example systems described as multiple communicating processes shows the ability of the proposed method to accurately estimate the worst case performance of the system implementation.