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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/D054087/1
Title: Perform-DB: A Distributed Collaborative Performance Engineering Environment
Principal Investigator: Bradley, Dr JT
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Mr ABK Argent-Katwala
Project Partners:
Department: Computing
Organisation: Imperial College London
Scheme: First Grant Scheme Pre-FEC
Starts: 15 May 2006 Ends: 14 May 2008 Value (£): 124,903
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Modelling & simul. of IT sys. Networks & Distributed Systems
System on Chip
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
Performance modellers waste much conceptual and computational effort independently recreating and analysing the same models. Performance modelling is especially necessary in communication protocols, for instance in, Bluetooth device discovery, IEEE 1394 Firewire quality-of-service or Courier communications protocol response-time where probabilistic guarantees of timely operation are essential to the correct operation of the overall system.We propose a collaborative, distributed performance engineering environment called Perform-DB, which will create an automated repository of well-engineered performance model components along with associated analysis results.Perform-DB will enable collaboration by: providing interoperability for models written in different formalisms; providing engineers with searchable web-interface access to other researcher's performance designs; allowing third party researchers to suggest modifications to existing models while preserving referential integrity to previous versions, so that previous subscribers to that model keep their systems consistent.Perform-DB is not designed to be just a single-site project. Perform-DB can act as a gateway to other universities' performance model repositories. If successful, the project will consist of a distributed network of Perform-DB nodes, which contain projects that reference models, queries and results from many different Perform-DB repositories. Ultimately, in a future project, this will become the framework for a distributed computational engine for performance analysis as well.Perform-DB will offer a web-based interface to a selection of current performance modelling tool chains, which are enabled on the GRAIL cluster computer. Also, Perform-DB will allow users of other tool chains the ability to upload models and results and even describe how those models and results relate to other supported formalisms, through the use of user-definable translation semantics. Finally, Perform-DB will be running background tasks that will search for useful structural properties of existing models (eg bisimulation, reversibility, separability of solution) that existing tools can make use of during solution. Crucial to this aspect of the environment is the ability to automate the discovery and reuse of pre-calculated results in the Perform-DB database for similar components in new models.
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Organisation Website: http://www.imperial.ac.uk