PerfCenter: A Methodology and Tool for Performance Analysis of Application Hosting Centers

The authors present a tool, PerfCenter that takes as input the deployment, configuration, message flow and workload details of the hardware and software servers in an application hosting center, and predicts the performance of the applications. They allow for a hierarchical specification of the data center, where software is deployed on machines, machines consist of hardware devices and are deployed on LANs. They also explicitly model network links between LANs and model the contention at those links due to messages exchanged between servers.