Extracting passage times from PEPA models with the HYDRA tool: a case study

Abstract

Passage time densities and quantiles are important performance metrics which are increasingly used in specifying service level agreements (SLAs) and benchmarks. PEPA is a popular stochastic process algebra and a powerful formalism for describing performance models of communication and computer systems. We present a case study passage time analysis of an 82,944 state PEPA model using the HYDRA tool. HYDRA specialises in passage time analysis of large Markov systems based on stochastic Petri nets. By using the new Imperial PEPA compiler (ipc), we can construct a HYDRA model from a PEPA model and obtain passage time densities based on the original PEPA description.