Scalable Differential Analysis of Large Process Algebra Models

This tutorial is concerned with the performance evaluation of hardware/software systems using ordinary differential equations which approximate large-scale continuous-time Markov processes derived from models described with the stochastic process algebra PEPA. The tutorial is divided into three parts. The first part illustrates the main theoretical results. The second part gives an overview of a software tool-the PEPA Eclipse Plug-in-which supports the differential analysis of PEPA. In the last part, this approach is related to other efficient analysis techniques in the literature. In particular, a comparison against layered queues is presented.