A Subsystem-Oriented Performance Evaluation Tool for Computer Architectures

Abstract

Although performance evaluation tools are popular for analyzing and predicting throughput of computer systems, existing evaluation tools usually have a difficult and time-consuming modeling process because (1) modeling requires specific mathematical background；(2) most modern systems are too large and complex to be modeled directly；and (3) modeling for exploring various alternative designs always takes time and patience. Moreover, existing tools do not support well the capability for finding the bottleneck and its cause of a target system being evaluated. To address the above problems, in this paper we propose a subsystem-oriented approach to analytical performance modeling of computer systems. The whole approach is built on a subsystem-oriented performance evaluation methodology and tool, which are, in turn , base on a subsystem specification language.