A codesign approach for distributed systems

Distributed systems have become prevalent in response to the rapidly expanding Internet´s demands. Their design presents new challenges because it involves the interaction of hardware and software. Continual marketplace innovation drives computing toward heterogeneity in both hardware and software and generates a complexity that goes beyond the earlier codesign approaches, which were developed for more homogeneous systems executing in non-distributed environments. Codesign of heterogeneous systems requires the support of a powerful modeling and simulation environment because analysis alone cannot deal with all the challenges such complex systems pose. We believe that modeling and simulation, using the discrete-event system specification modeling and simulation framework, are the most suitable vehicles to study the complexities associated with developing distributed-object computing systems