EDPEPPS: An integrated graphical toolset for the design and performance evaluation of portable parallel software

Abstract

This paper describes an integrated graphicM toolset for performance-oriented design of portable parallel software. The toolset consists of a graphical design tool based on the PVM communications library for building parallel algorithms, a simulation engine and a visualisation tool for animation of program execution and visualisation of platform and network performance measures and statistics. The toolset is used to model a virtual machine composed of a cluster of workstations interconnected by a local area network. The simulation model used is modular and its components are interchangeable which allows easy reconfiguration of the platform. The model is validated using experiments on the COMMS1 Benchmark from the Parkbench suite, and a standard image processing algorithm with accuracy to within 10%.

Performance evaluation of a consensus algorithm with Petri nets

“…For 7 participants, the same time becomes 24 hours. This is an important drawback of the simulation as a performance evaluation tool, but several studies [4] prove that it has to be accepted for a detailed behaviour description of parallel algorithms, since the detailed models are too complex to be solved analytically. Using the Central Limit Theorem of statistics and the independent replications method, it is possible to build 95% confidence interval around the termination time values.…”

“…The major drawback of using such a powerful formalism is to loose the analysis capabilities of classical Petri nets. The simulation becomes the only way to verify the behaviour of the Petri net model, but this is also the price to pay when using other formalisms, like queuing networks [4].…”

“…Processes are subject to crash failures and crashed processes never recover. A process p i~P may (1) send a message to another process, (2) receive a message sent by another process, (3) perform some local computation or (4) crash. Communication is by message passing, asynchronous (the transmission delays are unbounded) and reliable.…”

An integrated CSP-based tool for the visualisation, animation and performance evaluation of message passing algorithms

“…Many of these are based on purely visual notations such as Petri Nets ([16]) or on implementation languages ([ 111, [5]) rather than on formal notations. Many tools related to the CSP notation have been concerned with model checking, and most CSP animation tools (such as ProBE [ 131) produce purely textual, rather than visual, output.…”