Performance Modeling and Prediction of Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems: A Survey of the State of the Art

Performance is one of the key features of parallel and distributed computing systems. Therefore, in the past a significant research effort was invested in the development of approaches for performance modeling and prediction of parallel and distributed computing systems. In this pa-per we identify the trends, contributions, and drawbacks of the state of the art approaches. We describe a wide range of the performance modeling approaches that spans from the high-level mathematical modeling to the detailed instruction-level simulation. For each approach we de-scribe how the program and machine are modeled and esti-mate the model development and evaluation effort, the effi-ciency, and the accuracy. Furthermore, we present an over-all evaluation of the presented approaches.