Parameters for system effectiveness evaluation of distributed systems

In a Distributed Computing System (DCS), the failure of one or more system components causes the degradation in its effectiveness to complete a given task as opposed to a complete network breakdown. This paper addresses the issue of degraded system effectiveness evaluation by introducing two static measures, namely, Distributed Program Performance Index (DPPI) and Distributed System Performance Index (DSPI). These metrics can be used to compare networks with different features for application execution. It can be used to determine if the network with high reliability and low capacity, or low reliability and high capacity is better for a given program execution. An algorithm is also developed for computing these indices, and it is shown to be not only efficient, but general enough to compute many other existing measures such as computer networks, distributed systems, transaction based systems, etc.