ON THE COMPUTATION OF PERFORMANCE-CHARACTERISTICS OF CONCURRENT PROGRAMS USING GSPNS

Petri net based models are proposed in this paper as the vehicles for the characterization of the processing and communication parameters of concurrent programs. A technique for the construction of a GSPN model as a direct translation of a concurrent program is used and a method is presented that allows to build, from a GSPN model, graph representations that are useful for preliminary assessment of the performance of the programs and for solving the problem of allocating the process of a concurrent program to the processors of a given architecture. The concept of phase in the execution of a concurrent program is introduced and used to construct communication graphs that are simpler than those obtained considering the execution of a program as a whole. An example of the application of the technique is presented together with experimental results obtained from direct measurements of a real program. The agreement between the performance indices computed with the models and the results of direct measurements shows the practical relevance of this technique.