Performance analysis techniques of distributed computations: application to buffer processing in a distributed environment

An integrated analysis framework is presented which consists of a hierarchy of models and analysis techniques that can be applied at different levels of the design of distributed computations. The goal is to determine a computation response time as viewed by a user and show how a software's response time can be affected by properties of the underlying communication subnetwork. The result of the computation structure analysis is applied to a buffer processing system and it is shown that transient variations in communication network parameters can shift the execution of a computation from a stable operating region, where execution time cost remains acceptable, to an unstable state