Performance Modeling of Design Patterns for Distributed Computation

Abstract

In software engineering, design patterns are commonly used and represent robust solution templates to frequently occurring problems in software design and implementation. In this paper, we consider performance simulation for two design patterns for processing of parallel messaging. We develop continuous-time Markov chain models of two commonly used design patterns, Half-Sync/Half-Async and Leader/Followers, for their performance evaluation in multicore machines. We propose a unified modeling approach which contemplates a detailed description of the application-level logic and abstracts away from operating system calls and complex locking and networking application programming interfaces. By means of a validation study against implementations on a 16-core machine, we show that the models accurately predict peak throughputs and variation trends with increasing concurrency levels for a wide range of message processing workloads. We also discuss the limits of our models when memory-level internal contention is not captured.