Performance Engineering for Mission Critical Embedded Computer Systems

This report provides background information on performance engineer ing and the POD performance modeling tool, and gives an overview of the project activities. Finally, the project summary section reviews the results, lessons learned, and suggests future direction. Naval mission critical, embedded computer systems MC-ECS must respond to external events within their allotted time, otherwise they fail. Failures may have life or death consequences. Lifecycle performance management, or performance engineering PE, calls for building performance into systems beginning in the requirements definition phase, and continuing the performance management through the design, implementation, testing, and post-deployment phases. Experience with PE shows that it can detect and avoid project-threatening performance failures in sufficient time to correct them and enable timely delivery of a quality product. Furthermore, performance is orders of magnitude better with this approach than with a fix it later approach in which performance considerations are deferred to the testing phase and, when necessary, tuning attempts to correct performance failures. Better performance means both people and computer resources can be used to enhance the functionality of the system rather than to correct performance deficiencies. kr