Modeling is an important activity in any system design and complex designs can be visually represented through modeling techniques. One such important modeling technique is Unified Modeling Language (UML), which has been widely accepted as a standard for visual representation of research problems. In computer architecture, pipelining is one of the architectural methods for increasing processor performance by partitioning the process into simpler computational steps that can be executed independently in different functional units like adders, multipliers, shifters, and so on. Pipeline techniques can also be applied to speed up numerical arithmetic computation. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to increase the performance of arithmetic pipeline, especially for floating point computation after designing the complete model of static arithmetic pipeline design through UML. In this paper, UML class, sequence and activity diagrams are designed and performance of this model is evaluated through numerical computation of data in the sum of floating points.

UML is a visual modeling language widely accepted by the industry for specifying, visualizing, constructing and documenting the artifacts of software systems, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems. A number of research papers have explored the possibilities of applying UML in modeling of complex real-time and embedded system design. Gomma (2001) has developed a UML based concurrent object modeling and architectural design method for designing real-time and distributed applications. The UML based modeling of parallel and distributed systems for performance oriented applications is described by Pllana and Fahringer (2002). Bahill and Daniels (2003) advocated the adoption of Object-Oriented and UML tools for non-software designs, i.e., systems, hardware and algorithms and presented a case study on the design of heating, ventilation and air conditioning system using UML.

There are very few research papers on applications of UML in computer architecture problems. Milner and Davidson (2002) developed a graphical tool, called Quick Piping, for modeling processor pipelines. Reshadi and Dutt (2005) presented a Petri Net based modeling approach, using its variant "Reduced Colored Petri Net (RCPN) model", for capturing pipelined processors. Recently, Saxena et al. (2007) proposed the UML model for the Multiplex system for the processes which are being executed in distributed environment. In a recent paper by Saxena and Raj (2008), UML modeling has been used for the instruction pipeline design and computed the performance of the design. Pustina Lukas et al. (2008) presented a UML based modeling methodology of specifying processor details of ARM. In this paper, UML diagrams are used to model the system architecture and timing behavior.

Unified Modeling Language, UML, system architecture, UML diagrams, UML model, Multiplex system, Reduced Colored Petri Net model, RCPN, research papers, applications, computer architecture, graphical tool, non-software systems, software systems, business modeling, system architecture, Systems Management.