Assessing the performance of multiprocessor architectures through SWN models simulation: a case study in the field of plant automation systems

Presents a simulation study of a hypercube architecture of complex nodes. The goal of the simulation experiments is to compare two possible architectural solutions for the complex nodes, and to study the hypercube behaviour under different types of workload. The models have been expressed in the formalism of stochastic well-formed nets (SWNs), which is a class of high-level stochastic Petri nets, and the results have been obtained using a general-purpose simulator for SWN models. In this study, the availability of a general-purpose simulator and the flexibility and parametricity of the SWN formalism has indeed been a crucial point in what we think is a successful example of "benchmarking by models": a characterization of an architecture in terms of models, rather than by measurement.