A hierarchical modeling framework for designing a real-time parallel distributed software system is presented. The focus is on the integration of a variety of modeling techniques to represent different aspects of software performance. It provides a richer software development environment to support the designer to coping with the different modeling and analysis methods during different stages of the design and development process. The difference parameters and attributes of the various models extant are identified, the relationships between the models and their attributes are defined, and these relationships are used to build an object-oriented database system. This database is the core component of a complete computer-aided performance evaluation (CAPE) environment that supports the designer during the development process. >