The PAPS (Performance Analysis of Parallel Systems) toolset is a testb
ed for the model based performance prediction of message passing paral
lel applications executed on private memory multiprocessor computer sy
stems. PAPS allows to describe the execution behavior of the computer
hardware and operating system software resources up to a very detailed
level. This enables very accurate performance prediction of parallel
applications even in the case of substantial performance degradation d
ue to contention for shared resources. In this paper the fundamental d
esign principles and implementation methodologies for the development
of the PAPS toolset are presented and the PAPS parallel system specifi
cation formalisms are described. A simplified performance study of a p
arallel Gaussian elimination application on the nCUBE 2 multiprocessor
system is used to demonstrate the usage of the tool.