A performance prototyping approach to designing concurrent software architectures

A prototyping approach to evaluating the performance of parallel and distributed software architectures is proposed. The approach utilises conventional object-oriented modelling to describe the system requirements. Alternative architectural approaches are then derived and expressed in the PARSE process graph notation, and performance prototyping and formal validation tools allow various aspects of the proposed solution to be rapidly explored. This paper describes work-in-progress on the HL language and prototyping environment which enables designers to express architectural structures in a simple language, and provides an execution environment which allows the potential performance of the architecture to be investigated. The paper gives an overview of the language and tools, and illustrates its application with an example.