Performance Optimization of Software Systems Processing Information Sequences Modeled by Probabilistic Languages

The performance of a hardware/software system is a function of both the deterministic properties of the computation being performed and the probabilistic properties of the information sequence being processed. This paper develops the idea of a computational cost which can be used to measure system performance and shows how this cost can be related to the structure of the system and the information processed by the system. Different ways in which this cost can be used to study system performance are presented.