Performance evaluation is a critical stage of software- and hardware-system development that every computer engineer and scientist should master. Although complex – requiring skills in mathematics, measurement techniques and simulation – performance evaluation is primarily an art; indeed, the most difficult stage in a performance analysis is defining the approach: once you know what to do, it is less difficult to define a plan of attack with your familiar software tools. We present a set of topics, which we believe should be part of every engineer’s intellectual toolkit. This includes the statistical exploitation of numerical results in an efficient and ethical way, for example: how to summarize variability or fairness; what transient removal in a simulation is; and how to make predictions from a time series. We also present well-known performance patterns, which helps to quickly bring the engineer to the main issues. For queuing theory, we focus on a subset of very useful results, such as operational laws. A highlight of the book is the development of Palm calculus, also called “the importance of the viewpoint,” which is central to queuing theory. Indeed, this topic has so many applications to simulation and to system analysis in general that it is a very good time investment. This book began as a set of lecture notes for a course given at EPFL.
The book contains all the material needed by an engineer who wishes to master the theoretical foundations of performance evaluation and to then evaluate the performance of a real computer or communication system. Methodology - Summarizing Performance Data and Confidence Intervals - Model Fitting - Tests - Forecasting - Discrete Event Simulation - Palm Calculus, or the Importance of the Viewpoint - Queuing Theory for Those who cannot Wait - Annexes - A Tables - B Parametric Estimation, Large Sample Theory - C Gaussian Random Vectors in Rn - D Digital Filters - E Bibliography - F Index |  | |
