Teaching Performance Modeling in the Era of 140characters Information

It is not easy to state the birthdate of Performance Modeling (PM). On April 1971, a workshop on System Performance Evaluation was held at Harvard University. Richard Muntz was the chairman of the session “Queueing Theoretic Models”. In that session, Jeffrey Buzen presented “Analysis of system bottlenecks using a queueing network model”. In the 70s, some groups were founded to work on the computer performance modeling. The National Bureau of Standards organized several task groups and the Computer Performance Evaluation Users Group collected people “from many United States Governmental agencies involved in various phases of this field … a number of academicians as well as analysts from business and industry working in this area, and this gave rise to the formation within the ACM of SIGME [Special Interest Group in Measurement and Evaluation] which is currently known as SIGMETRICS.” In 1973 the International Federation for Information Processing founded the Working Group 7.3 Computer System Modelling and its International Symposium on Computer Performance Modeling, Measurement, and Evaluation started to take place. More difficult is to go back to the first courses in general Performance modeling and prediction. Definitely, in the 80s the PM area reached its peak and relative courses were taught in some universities for some decades. In the first years of 2000, some of these general PM courses started to disappear while specific contents still remained in courses relative to applications as “tools” for that particular area. A question naturally arises: is it no more time to teach the modelling principles and basic methodologies? Is it time to just use the techniques in specific domains? The author has not sure answers, but some doubts. Starting from a close examination of the state of the art of PM courses in the main Universities, we try to give some food for thought about the role of the education, the meaning of knowledge and information, their difference and the importance of criticism to face with incoming changing challenges.