Using distributed simulation for distributed application development

The software engineering environment DESIGN integrates several approaches for the development of distributed applications. The distributed programming language DC provides for language support. A workstation based human interface integrates programming tools such as a language sensitive editor, a distributed debugger, data evaluation tools, etc. This paper concentrates on a further approach of DESIGN: performance evaluation and prototyping on the basis of distributed simulation. The use of distributed simulation allowed to make effective use of the parallelism provided by a distributed system, not only after the accomplishment of a distributed program, but from the very beginning of the development. A central goal of the DESIGN approach was computer assisted modeling, i.e. automatic generation of the simulation model out of the program text of a network application under development; this feature substantially simplifies performance evaluation and optimization in early development phases. The distributed simulation approach, the computer assisted modeling technique, and the modeling system for distributed applications are the main topics of the paper.