Workload Modeling for Parallel Processing Systems

The workload of a computer system is traditionally de ned as all inputs from the user to the system As the use of this real workload is usually impossible in most performance analysis studies it is necessary to abstract from the real workload and to construct a test workload model There are already quite established methodologies and techniques for workload modeling of uniprocessor systems but these techniques cannot be applied directly to parallel processing systems PPS because of the di erent nature of the workload of a PPS Therefore this paper addresses selected issues of a workload modeling methodology for PPS The ba sic components that a workload model for a parallel system has to represent are identi ed and the in u ences of the objective of the analysis and the evalu ation methods are discussed Finally we investigate workload modeling in a performance oriented parallel software development cycle