CAPLAN Project
The purpose of this CIT-project was to develop technologies to perform application-level capacity planning of distributed computing environments. These technologies will be utilised as the basis for capacity planning tools for use in the management and support of heterogeneous client-server environments
For most interesting computer applications, it is a difficult task to find the bottlenecks of the system with respect to use of resources. This includes use of CPU-time, memory, secondary storage, network traffic, etc. With modern distributed applications, the problem has become even more complicated. A typical distributed application may involve 1-3 database servers, 20 application servers and 1,000 clients. For such applications, tools are needed to analyse the use of resources to help balancing the work load.
The CAPLAN project has developed CPN models of three distributed applications selected by Hewlett-Packard. This served as a basis for evaluating the usefulness of CP-nets and Design/CPN for capacity modelling of distributed systems. The work is continued in the HP-CPN Centre.
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company designs, manufactures and services products and systems for measurement, computation and communications. The basic business purpose is to create information products that accelerate the advancement of knowledge and improve the effectiveness of people and organisations. The company's products and services are used in industry, business, engineering, science, medicine and education in more than 120 countries.In the era of the Mainframe, capacity planning of the resource requirements of a computer installation became a well-understood discipline. However, with the introduction of complex networks of systems (Internets) and the development of distributed applications, the art of capacity planning became too complex for the tools and methodologies in common use by systems analysts. The key technology needed is robust models of the distributed application environment, and the ability to automate (as much as possible) the model development and validation process.
HP's World-wide Customer Support Operations (WCSO) support tens of thousands of customers in the management and planning of their information systems. Further, the ability to support customer environments is greatly enhanced by having robust information of the customer's installationand the ability to validate correct configurations and operations. The support and planning process is limited by not having robust models of the customer environment. HP has robust data collection and measurement tools. What is needed in order to complete the tool set to perform capacity planning is the modelling technology. HP is very interested in the application of CP-nets as a solution to these problems.
Project Group
- Research manager:
- Søren Christensen, Assoc. Prof., PhD, DAIMI
Phone: +45 8942 5627, E-mail: schristensen@daimi.au.dk - Business manager:
- Janice Bogorad, Hewlett-Packard, Copenhagen
Phone: +45 4599 1355, E-mail: janice_bogorad@hp.com - Other members of the project group:
- Kurt Jensen, Assoc. Prof., Dr. Scient, DAIMI (kjensen@daimi.au.dk)
Kjeld H. Mortensen, PostDoc., DAIMI (khm@daimi.au.dk)
Lars M. Kristensen, Cand. Scient., PhD student, DAIMI (kris@daimi.au.dk)
Jan Skræp Thomasen, Hewlett-Packard Denmark (thomasen@daimi.au.dk)
Bo Lindstrøm, Student Programmer, DAIMI (blind@daimi.au.dk)
Lisa Wells, Student Programmer, DAIMI (wells@daimi.au.dk)
Last modified: Tue Oct 3 13:41:39 2000 -- CP-nets Webmaster
http://www.daimi.au.dk/CPnets/CAPLAN