1.6 Role of performance evaluation in computer engineering

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Presently there is a great deal of interest and activity in the design and use of computer systems, such as centralized, vector, parallel, distributed, and client/server architectures. These computer systems are being researched, developed, produced, and marketed by individuals and organizations from government, industry, and academia. These research and development activities are motivated by the rapidly changing technologies of devices, software and systems, increased performance requirements, increasing complexity and sophistication of basic building blocks, peripherals, interconnections and control, the constant demand for improved reliability and availability, and the increasing reliance of organizations on the use of computer facilities in all aspects of business.

Present desktop computer systems provide more features than were previously available in a single, large time-sharing system. Specifically, some features include the sharing of resources on a much more global scale, as well as the fulfillment of system requirements such as expandability, flexibility, availability, reliability, reconfigurability, fault tolerance, graceful degradation, responsiveness, speed, throughput capacity, logical complexity, and ease of development (modularity). Another appealing feature of contemporary computer systems is their ability to bring the computing power to the user without sacrificing the ability to get at all the available information assets from the business.

The optimal design and/or selection of a computer system is, therefore, of the utmost importance if the target computing facility is to provide new and improved services over what is presently available to the target domain application. But how does one go about doing this? What techniques and tools are available for this purpose? These are among the questions that this book will address for the computer systems architect, researcher, designer, purchaser, or student. It is set up to cover the essentials of modeling and analysis of computer systems hardware and software environments. Covered topics include the basic technologies associated with computer systems hardware, software, and networking; details of modeling techniques used to study computer hardware and software configurations; and the description of software tools that have been used to model such systems.

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