Generalized stochastic Petri nets and their use in modeling distributed architectures

A Petri-net-based approach to evaluating the performance of distributed systems is described. The structural properties and temporal specifications of generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPNs) are reviewed. The effectiveness of this modeling technique in the case of parallel architectures is shown through examples related both to conventional common bus structures and to multiple-instruction stream, multiple-data stream (MIMD) massively parallel architectures. Emphasis is given to the approach to be followed in model development and validation, rather than to numerical results obtainable from the specific models developed