HP Labs Technical Reports

Systems of Systems as Communicating Structures

Kotov, Vadim

HPL-97-124

Keyword(s): concurrent distributed systems; systems of systems; Communicating Structures; object-oriented modeling; visualization; large-scale systems

Abstract: By Systems of Systems (SoS) we mean large-scale concurrent and distributed systems the components of which are complex systems themselves (e.g. enterprise intranets). Communicating Structures are hierarchical structures that represent SoS in a uniform, systematic way as composition of a small number of basic system objects. Communicating Structures are focused on modeling of SoS the performance of which largely depends on communication, data traffic and data placement. The systems components are represented as nodes. The nodes have memory that may contain items. Nets are sets of links that connect the nodes. The items move from a node to a node along links. All these objects may have hierarchical structure. CSL is a C++ based library and an object-oriented core environment for the modeling and analysis of SoS in the framework of Communicating Structures. It includes both simulation and analytical (queueing analysis) options as well as GUI for the model construction and visualization tools for analysis of the modeling results. A case study in which CSL was used to analyze a global distributed computing environment is presented.

16 Pages

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