A Petri Net Approach for Performance Oriented Parallel Program Design

Performance orientation in the development process of parallel software is motivated by outlining the misconception of current approaches where performance activies come in at the very end of the development, mainly in terms of measurement or monitoring after the implementation phase. At that time major part of the development work is already done, and performance pitfalls are very hard to repair-if this is possible at all. A development process for parallel programs that launches performance engineering in the early design phase is proposed, based on a Petri net speciication methodology for the performance critical parts of a parallel system. The Petri net formalism is used to deene Program Resource Mapping-net (PRM-net) models , that serve as an integrated performance model of parallel processing systems, combining performance characteristics of parallel programs (P-net), parallel hardware (R-net) and the assignment of programs to hardware (Mapping) into a single performance model, while simultaneously representing the speciication of a parallel application. Predictable parallel algorithm skeletons are worked out as PRM-net models to simultaneously serve as generic program templates to be instantiated according to speciic needs, thus representing the starting point of the development process. The systematic integration of a set of tools supporting performance oriented parallel programming results in the CAPSE (Computer Aided Parallel Software Engineering) environment, which is being built around the PRM-net methodology. Speciication and performance prediction of parallel applications at the algorithm structure level are demonstrated by example.