Performance modeling using PDL

Designers characterize system performance with such quantifiable performance attributes as throughput rate, reliability, longest path delay, cost and area. To model system performance, designers create executable descriptions of one or more attributes. In this article, we introduce a new performance modeling approach using a high-level performance modeling language called PDL (Performance Description Language). PDL is useful for writing generic performance models for attributes of large classes of systems. The PDL system can process performance data and generate a variety of detailed graphs that can be used for trade-off analysis. PDL performance modeling has the same goals as functional modeling in hardware description languages (HDLs): pre-implementation analysis at all abstraction levels, improved documentation, improved contractor accountability and increased reusability. As concurrent engineering becomes central to system-design methodologies, domain-independent performance-modeling tools become increasingly important. PDL is a first step toward further development of robust general-purpose environments for performance modeling and evaluation.