Overview

A three-years project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) under the FIRB (Fondo per gli Investimenti della Ricerca di Base) Programme.

Research Groups
University of Bologna (Lorenzo Donatiello)
University of Cagliari (Francesco Aymerich)
University of Firenze (Giacomo Bucci)
University of Messina (Antonio Puliafito)
Politecnico of Milano (Giuseppe Serazzi)
University of Modena (Michele Colajanni)
University of Pavia (Mariacarla Calzarossa)
University of Piemonte Orientale (Andrea Bobbio)
IIT CNR Pisa (Marco Conti)
University of Pisa (Luciano Lenzini)
University of Roma "La Sapienza" (Bruno Ciciani)
University of Roma "Tor Vergata" (Giuseppe Iazeolla)
University of Torino (Gianfranco Balbo)
University Ca' Foscari of Venezia (Simonetta Balsamo)
Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (Salvatore Tucci)

The popularity of communication networks, the turbulent growth of distributed applications, the availability of huge amount of information, the need to cope with the entangled management of resources more and more complex make the modern society highly dependent on information systems.

Within this scenario, the functionality, the efficiency and the reliability of these systems are critical for the Information Society to work properly. The rapid growth of the complexity of the systems requires the availability of software tools able to understand the peculiarities of the existing systems and to ease the design and development of new systems. The convergence between Internet (World Wide Web), mobile telephony (Wireless Communications) and multimedia, the need of applications working properly   even in presence of faults (Fault Tolerance), the development of computation intensive applications able to exploit the large potentialities of network resources (High Performance Computing) open new performance issues. New methodologies, measurement and modeling techniques for performance evaluation have to be developed. All these issues represent a major challenge for the community of researchers working in the performance evaluation field.

The aim of this Project is to study the foundations of performance evaluation, i.e., reliability, efficacy, efficiency, safety, and other Quality of Service attributes, and to advance the state of the art of its methods and tools as to make them able to tackle the complexity of the applications and the systems driving the Information Society and easy to use even by  non specialists.

The research activities of the 15 research groups involved in the Project will focus on measurement techniques and workload characterization, on formalisms for modeling quantitative and qualitative aspects of complex systems, on solution methods of analytical, numerical and simulation models.

In particular, the research is organized into five Work Packages. The activities carried out within these Work Packages deal with workload models, measurement techniques, models based on formalisms, such as, single queue, queueing networks, stochastic Markovian and non Markovian processes, timed Petri nets, stochastic non Markovian Petri nets, process algebra and fault tree, methodologies and tools to predict, at design time, the performance of the system under study, exact closed and iterative solutions, approximate solutions, simulation models of complex systems, distributed simulations. Within each activity, new techniques and methodologies will be proposed. Tools for performance evaluation will be developed as an integral part of such activities.

For more information: perf at www.perf.it
Site maintained by the University of Pavia