Hewlett-Packard Labs
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
frolund@hpl.hp.com
garg@hpl.hp.com
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Svend_Frolund
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Pankaj_Garg
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
vol. 8, no. 4 (October 1998)
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1,518 KB)
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We present a case study in using simulation at design time to predict the performance and scalability properties of a large-scale distributed object system. The system, called Consul, is a network management system that is designed to support hundreds of operators managing millions of network devices. It is essential that a system such as Consul be designed with performance and scalability in mind, but due to Consul's complexity and scale, it is hard to reason about performance and scalability using ad-hoc techniques. We built a simulation of Consul's design to guide the design process by enabling performance and scalability analysis of various design alternatives. A major challenge in doing design-time simulation is that many parameters for the simulation are based on estimates rather than measurements. We developed analysis methods that derive conclusions that are valid in the presence of estimation errors. In this paper we describe our scalability analysis method for design simulations of distributed object systems. The main idea is to use relative and comparitive reasoning to analyze design alternatives and compare transaction behaviors. We demonstrate the analysis approach by describing its application to Consul.
simulation; scalability analysis; performance model; performance evaluation; distributed application design; software design
I.6.6: Computing Methodologies, Simulation and Modeling, Simulation Output Analysis
I.6.3: Computing Methodologies, Simulation and Modeling, Applications