Evaluation methodologies for an advanced information processing system

Abstract

The system concept and requirements for an Advanced Information Processing System (AIPS) are briefly described, but the emphasis of this paper is on the evaluation methodologies being developed and utilized in the AIPS program. The evaluation tasks include hardware reliability, maintainability and availability, software reliability, performance, and performability. Hardware RMA and software reliability are addressed with Markov modeling techniques. The performance analysis for AIPS is based on queueing theory. Performability is a measure of merit which combines system reliability and performance measures. The probability laws of the performance measures are obtained from the Markov reliability models. Scalar functions of this law such as the mean and variance provide measures of merit in the AIPS performability evaluations.