Computer Performance Evaluation: Preface

This issue of the Computer Journal is a special issue of the 6th European Performance Engineering Workshop (EPEW 2009), held at Imperial College London during 9–10 July 2009. EPEW has a successful record of gathering performance modelling, analysis and experience papers over the past 7 years and EPEW 2009 was no exception. EPEW 2009 was the first in the EPEW series to be held in the UK, following on from the highly successful workshops that were held in Toledo (2004), Versailles (2005), Budapest (2006), Berlin (2007) and Palma de Majorca (2008). EPEW 2010 is being run in Bertinoro, Italy. From the 17 papers selected for the EPEW workshop [1–17], the best papers were invited to submit extended versions of their papers along with other open submissions. In total seven papers were received and went through an extensive second reviewing process. From those, four papers were selected for publication in the special issue. The papers in this special issue represent different fields of performance engineering and analysis, broadly classified by applications, techniques and experimentation. In the applications domain, Lebrecht et al. [18] present a study of hardware models of RAID 01 and RAID 5 disk systems using fork-join queueing analysis. Thomas and Zhou [19] extend the classical Mean Value Analysis technique to a class of a stochastic process algebra. They apply their techniques to a security-based model of the Needham-Schroeder key distribution protocol. Balbo et al. [20] extend traditional generalised stochastic Petri nets (GSPNs) with a tagged customer method to aid the computation of useful first passage time measures. In the experimentation arena, we have a paper by Smith and Lladó [21] which presents a classification of types of performance result and experiment. This has enabled them to produce an interchange file format for performance results that allows a consistent specification and presentation of results from a variety of tools. I would like to take this opportunity to thank both the authors and also the 28 reviewers who committed considerable time and efforts to reviewing the papers for this special issue.