Performance modeling and analysis of a distributed computing environment

The paper studies the performance of computing environment design alternatives for an application workload associated with a large software product generation process. A number of configurations based on shared memory multiprocessor computing platforms and network file servers are considered in the study. The various computing environment configurations are differentiated based on the location of the devices that provide physical storage for the input and output files of the software product generation process, and the characteristics of the computing platforms that are used to provide compute and file services. The evaluation of the design alternatives is based on a multiclass priority queuing network model that is used to analyze system performance under various load conditions, identify potential bottlenecks and study design tradeoffs