1st International ICST Workshop on Run-time mOdels for Self-managing Systems and Applications

Research Article

Real-Time Performance Modeling for Adaptive Software Systems

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2009.7944,
        author={Dinesh  Kumar and Asser  Tantawi and Li  Zhang},
        title={Real-Time Performance Modeling for Adaptive Software Systems},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Workshop on Run-time mOdels for Self-managing Systems and Applications},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={ROSSA},
        year={2010},
        month={5},
        keywords={estimation},
        doi={10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2009.7944}
    }
    
  • Dinesh Kumar
    Asser Tantawi
    Li Zhang
    Year: 2010
    Real-Time Performance Modeling for Adaptive Software Systems
    ROSSA
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2009.7944
Dinesh Kumar1,*, Asser Tantawi1,*, Li Zhang1,*
  • 1: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA
*Contact email: kumardi@us.ibm.com, tantawi@us.ibm.com, zhangli@us.ibm.com

Abstract

Modern, adaptive software systems must often adjust or reconfigure their architecture in order to respond to continuous changes in their execution environment. Efficient autonomic control in such systems is highly dependent on the accuracy of their representative performance model. In this paper, we are concerned with real-time estimation of a performance model for adaptive software systems that process multiple classes of transactional workload. Based on an open queueing network model and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), experiments in this work show that: 1) the model parameter estimates converge to the actual value very slowly when the variation in incoming workload is very low, 2) the estimates fail to converge quickly to the new value when there is a step-change caused by adaptive reconfiguration of the actual software parameters. We therefore propose a modified EKF design in which the measurement model is augmented with a set of constraints based on past measurement values. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach that leads to significant improvement in convergence in the two cases.