Modeling stream communications in component-based applications

Component technology is a promising approach to develop Grid applications, allowing to design very complex applications by hierarchical composition of basic components. Nevertheless, component applications on Grids have complex deployment models. Performance-sensitive decisions should be taken by automatic tools, matching developer knowledge about component performance with QoS requirements on the applications, in order to find deployment plans that satisfy a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This paper presents a steady-state performance model for component-based applications with stream communication semantics. The model strictly adheres to the hierarchical nature of component-based applications, and is of practical use in launch-time decisions.