The ipc/HYDRA tool chain for the analysis of PEPA models

PEPA is a popular stochastic process algebra and a powerful formalism for describing performance models of communication and computer systems. We augment the current state-of-the-art in the analysis of PEPA models by presenting a tool set that cannot only perform steady-state and transient analysis, but also response time analysis. Response time densities and quantiles are important performance metrics which are used to specify service level agreements (SLAs) and benchmarks. HYDRA is a tool specialising in response time analysis of large Markov systems based on stochastic Petri nets. By using the imperial PEPA compiler (ipc), we can generate a HYDRA model from a PEPA model and obtain steady-state, transient and response time measures based on the original PEPA description.