Performance Engineering Education: A Viewpoint

The successful development and marketing of commercial computer/communication systems requires the ability to quantify their performance and related metrics. Specifically, one should be able to demonstrate that projected customer requirements (QoS, QoE) are met, be able to identify bottlenecks, be able to evaluate and compare different configurations, and be able to evaluate and compare different designs. Performance engineering education should then train students to be able to carry out the above tasks. Exposure to three broad categories of approaches is necessary: Measurements aided by statistical techniques, analytic modeling and simulation. Both, the theory underlying these approaches and software packages that aid such analyses should be exposed. Besides failure-free performance, attention should also be devoted to reliability, availability, performability and survivability. In the current context, power consumption and security have gained importance as well. In this talk, we will take a journey through these issues.