• PEPA-club(Read more...) is taking a break until (Friday December 19th 2008). If you would like to give a talk in the new year please e-mail Allan Clark.
• PEPA Club meets on Fridays at 11:00 in Room 3.02 of the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh.
• The current PEPA Club organiser is Allan Clark.
• Anyone can join the PEPA Club mailing list.

• Bowled over by PEPA at ICT 2008: The PEPA modelling and analysis tools were on show at ICT 2008 in Lyon, France. ICT is Europe's biggest research event for information and communication technologies with 4,500 delegates in attendance this year. ICT presents Europe's priorities for information, computing and technology research, development and funding.
• Adam Duguid of the PEPA group was present at ICT 2008 to assist with the Sensoria project exhibit. The Sensoria project has built the PEPA modelling tools into the Sensoria Development Environment, a powerful modelling and analysis plaform for disributed and service-oriented systems.
• Adam demonstrated the state-of-the-art analysis facilities which are available in the International PEPA Compiler (IPC). IPC is available for download from the Tools page.

• PEPA has a new home. The PEPA group have now moved to the Informatics Forum in Crichton Street, Edinburgh. The Informatics Forum is an exciting new venue for our work on stochastic process algebras. It is located in the heart of Edinburgh city. Take a video tour of the Forum.
• Come and visit us! The PEPA group welcomes visitors interested in stochastic process algebra, performance modelling, simulation and other methods of quantitative analysis. We have plenty of office space in our beautiful new building and are happy to host visitors.
• Are you interested in doing a PhD on PEPA? We always welcome applications from interested students. Please send email to Jane.Hillston at ed.ac.uk in the first instance.

Software

• The PEPA Eclipse Plug-in is a development environment for PEPA, supporting Markovian analysis, continuous-space analysis and simulation. The PEPA Eclipse Plug-in is available for free download from the download site.
• For passage-time analysis the International PEPA Compiler provides a sophisticated query language for probing PEPA models to obtain response-time distributions along passages of interest through the model's behaviour. The International PEPA Compiler is available for free download from the download site.

Awards

• Congratulations to Professor Jane Hillston, personal chair in quantitative modelling at The University of Edinburgh and inventor of the PEPA language, who was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh at their award ceremony on 30th April 2007.
• Congratulations to Richard Hayden of Imperial College, London who was presented with the Microsoft Research Award for the Best Computational Science Student at the Science, Engineering & Technology Student of the Year awards held in Alexandra Palace London in September 2007. Richard won the award for his dissertation on PEPA, Addressing the state space explosion problem for PEPA models through fluid-flow approximation.

Selected recent papers

• Fluid flow approximation of PEPA models, Jane Hillston, QEST 2005
• Modelling the influence of RKIP on the ERK signalling pathway using the stochastic process algebra PEPA, Muffy Calder, Stephen Gilmore and Jane Hillston, TCSB 2006
• Evaluating quality of service for service level agreements, Allan Clark and Stephen Gilmore, FMICS 2006
• Stronger computational modelling of signalling pathways using both continuous and discrete-state methods, Muffy Calder, Adam Duguid, Stephen Gilmore and Jane Hillston, CMSB 2006
• Performance evaluation of backoff algorithms in 802.11 ad-hoc networks, T. Razafindralambo and F. Valois, PE-WASUN 2006
• Location-aware quality of service measurements for service-level agreements, A. Argent-Katwala, J. Bradley, A. Clark, and S. Gilmore, TGC 2007
• Evaluation of RSVP and Mobility-aware RSVP Using Performance Evaluation Process Algebra, H. Wang, D. Laurenson and J. Hillston, ICC 2008, To appear.

( ... all PEPA papers, ... PEPA bibliography )

New to PEPA?

The following papers provide an introduction to PEPA and the concepts involved.

• Tuning systems: From composition to performance, Jane Hillston, Computer Journal, 2005
• Process algebras for quantitative analysis, Jane Hillston, LICS 2005

About PEPA

Jane Hillston's PEPA is a stochastic process algebra which is used for modelling systems composed of concurrently active components which co-operate and share work. PEPA allows the modeller to study either behavioural or performance properties. This archive gives access to papers on PEPA, example models, and software tools which support the PEPA language. A LaTeX style file for PEPA is available (example). A TrueType font for PEPA is available. You can also search the site.

Pronunciation: PEPA is pronounced Pep-Ah, not Pea-Pah or Pay-Pah.