Modeling of parallel and distributed applications was a preoccupation of numerous research groups in the past. The increasing importance of applications that mix shared memory parallelism with message passing has complicated the modeling effort. Despite the fact that UML represents the de-facto standard modeling language, little work has been done to investigate whether UML can be employed to model performance-oriented parallel and distributed applications. This paper provides a critical look at the utility of UML to model shared memory and message passing applications by employing the UML extension mechanisms. The basic idea is to develop UML building blocks for the most important sequential, shared memory, and message passing constructs. These building blocks can be enriched with additional information, for instance, performance and control flow data. Subsequently, building blocks are combined to represent basically arbitrary complex applications. We will further describe how to model the mapping of applications onto process topologies.

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