A book for experts and practitioners, emphasizing the intuition and reasoning behind definitions and derivations related to evaluating computer systems performance.

Computer Systems Performance Evaluation and Prediction bridges the gap from academic to professional analysis of computer performance.This book makes analytic, simulation and instrumentation based modeling and performance evaluation of computer systems components understandable to a wide audience of computer systems designers, developers, administrators, managers and users. The book assumes familiarity with computer systems architecture, computer systems software, computer networks and mathematics including calculus and linear algebra.·Fills the void between engineering practice and the academic domain's treatment of computer systems performance evaluation and assessment·Provides a single source where the professional or student can learn how to perform computer systems engineering tradeoff analysis·Allows managers to realize cost effective yet optimal computer systems tuned to a specific application

Written with computer scientists and engineers in mind, this book brings queueing theory decisively back to computer science.

A generalized workload definition is presented which constructs measurable workloads of unit size from workload elements, called elementary processes. An elementary process makes almost exclusive use of one of the processors, CPU, I/O processor, etc., and is measured by the cost of its execution. Various kinds of user programs can be simulated by quantitative composition of elementary processes into a type. The character of the type is defined by the weights of its elementary processes and its structure by the amount and sequence of transitions between its elementary processes. A set of types is batched to a mix. Mixes of identical cost are considered as equivalent amounts of workload. These formalized descriptions of workloads allow investigators to compare the results of different studies quantitatively. Since workloads of different composition are assigned a unit of cost, these descriptions enable determination of cost effectiveness of different workloads on a machine. Subsequently performance parameters such as throughput rate, gain factor, internal and external delay factors are defined and used to demonstrate the effects of various workload attributes on the performance of a selected large scale computer system.

The goal of this book is to present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in computer architecture performance evaluation. The book covers various aspects that relate to performance evaluation, ranging from performance metrics, to workload selection, to various modeling approaches such as analytical modeling and simulation. And because simulation is by far the most prevalent modeling technique in computer architecture evaluation, the book spends more than half its content on simulation, covering an overview of the various simulation techniques in the computer designer's toolbox, followed by various simulation acceleration techniques such as sampled simulation, statistical simulation, and parallel and hardware-accelerated simulation. The evaluation methods described in this book have a primary focus on performance. Although performance remains to be a key design target, it no longer is the sole design target. Power consumption and reliability have quickly become primary design concerns, and today they probably are as important as performance. Other important design constraints relate to cost, thermal issues, yield, etc. This book focuses on performance evaluation methods only. This does not compromise on the importance and general applicability of the techniques described in this book because power and reliability models are typically integrated into existing performance models. These integrated models pose similar challenges to the ones handled in this book. The book also focuses on presenting fundamental concepts and ideas. The book does not provide much quantitative data. Although quantitative data is crucial to performance evaluation, to understand the fundamentals of performance evaluation methods it is not. Moreover, quantitative data from different sources may be hard to compare, and may even be misleading, because the contexts in which the results were obtained may be very different - a comparison based on these numbe

In this book, Krishna Kant provides a completely up-to-date treatment of the fundamental techniques of computer system performance modeling and evaluation. He discusses measurement, simulation, and analysis, and places a strong emphasis on analysis by including such topics as basic and advanced queuing theory, product form networks, aggregation, decomposition, performance bounds, and various forms of approximations. Applications involving synchronization between various activities are presented in a chapter on Petri net-based performance modeling, and a final chapter covers a wide range of problems involving steady state analysis, transient analysis, and optimization.

Based on the author's experience in industry, this book focuses on simple techniques for solving everyday problems in systems design and analysis. All techniques are covered in a non-mathematical way, so that no statistics expertise is necessary.