Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

The availability of low-cost powerful processors has made distributed computer systems a reality. Currently, the major stumbling block in the design of these systems is the difficulty of designing and validating concurrent software which is to control and execute on the new processors. There is a need for new techniques and tools for modeling and evaluating designs of distributed computer systems during early stages of design. The Distributed Systems Project at UCI has been investigating Petri Net-based modeling techniques and has developed a suite of tools, named P-NUT, for constructing and analyzing complex Petri Net models. This paper describes the motivation behind the selection of the Petri Net model, and describes the tools which currently exist.