Remembering RESQ
Tuesday, August 25th, 2020Ed MacNair and I published two books based on The Research Queueing Package, RESQ. Those books, previously published by Pearson Education, Inc. are now out of print. We are making PDF copies of lightly edited versions available under a Creative Commons license, at Simulation of Computer Communication Systems and Elements of Practical Performance Modeling. Though we have written two prior articles about RESQ history1,2, those did not cover subsequent development, so another recap seems appropriate now.
Pre-History
In the early 1970s, when computing capabilities were tiny, tiny, tiny compared to even a cell phone today, and those resources were typically time-shared across multiple users, queueing network models became a primary tool to analyze and improve system performance. Queueing models had been studied for years before regarding communication systems and other systems, but networks of queues seemed especially apropos for understanding time-sharing systems. Several of my fellow graduate students and I, students of Professors J.C. Browne and K.M. Chandy, decided we needed a queueing network simulation environment to accompany models solved by numerical and approximate methods. We defined and implemented QSIM3 for this purpose, including abstractions such as “passive servers”.
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