The proliferation of high performance computers and high-speed networks has made parallel and distributed computing feasible and cost-effective on High Performance Computing and Communication Systems (HPCC). However, the design, analysis and development of parallel and distributed applications on such computing systems are still very challenging tasks. Therefore, there is a great need for an integrated multilevel analysis methodology to assist in designing and analyzing the performance of both

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... xisting and proposed systems. Currently, there are no comprehensive analysis methods that address such diverse needs. This paper presents a three-level hierarchical modeling approach for analyzing the end-to-end performance of an application running on an HPCC system. The overall system is partitioned into application level, protocol level and network level. Functions at each level are modeled using queueing networks. Norton Equivalence for queueing networks and equivalent-queue representations of complex sections of the network are employed to simplify the analysis process. This approach enables the designer to study system performance for different types of networks and protocols and different design strategies. In this paper we use video-on-demand as an application example to show how our approach can be used to analyze the performance of such an application.