Constructing a Resource Usage View of a Large and Complex Software-Intensive System

Abstract

Abstract-A resource usage view consists of models that are important assets to analyze and control usage of hardware resources such as processors and memory elements. In this paper, we present the application of a top-down approach to construct a resource usage view using actual system runtime information. The models in this view help to address the concerns of a resource usage viewpoint providing information in terms of system-specific architecture and design execution elements such as execution scenarios, tasks, software components, processes, and threads. As part of our validation, constructing a resource usage view of an MRI system, a representative large software-intensive system, we observed that the constructed models for this view provide useful overviews and insights for practitioners to describe part of the system execution architecture and especially to analyze and evaluate the use of hardware resources in a top-down fashion.

A top‐down approach to construct execution views of a large software‐intensive system

“…The validation of our approach, presented in Section 5, shows that some of the execution models constructed with our approach are dedicated to support the description and analysis and assure the performance of a key feature like the start-up of the system. In addition, the validation of our approach presented in the study conducted by Callo Arias et al [13] shows that our approach supports the construction of execution models to describe and analyze the performance of data-intensive and computation-intensive features of the Philips MRI scanner.…”

“…Resource usage view: resource usage models can be used to provide overviews and facilitate the description of details about how the elements, e.g., component and process, of a system use hardware resources at runtime. An example of this kind of view and how to construct it is presented in the study conducted by Callo Arias et al [13]. Some of the questions that can be addressed with this kind of view are as follows:…”

“…Figure 11 illustrates and summarizes the size and implementation technology of this system, which demonstrates its complexity and importance as a case study. In our previous work [7,13,22], we reported the results of the approach for dependency analysis, resource usage analysis, and its actual application in practice, respectively. In this section, we summarize the validation of the approach with the construction of a set of execution models that build an execution profile view for the Philips MRI scanner.…”

“…We do not consider that our viewpoints can be used off-the-shelf but should be customized to the organization and project at hand to construct useful execution views in practice. The presentation of our approach in this article and our related research [7,6,13] illustrate how other practitioners and researchers can perform such customization for their particular settings. This may include the extension or specialization of the described execution models and execution viewpoints, adding their particular concerns and favorite ways to address them as described in the study conducted by Callo Arias et al [6].…”

Software Reverse Engineering in the Domain of Complex Embedded Systems

“…Customizable mapping rules are used to extract events from logging and run-time measurements to construct so-called execution viewpoints. For example, there are visualizations that show with different granularity the system's resource usage and start-up behavior in terms of execution times of various tasks or components in the system (Arias et al, 2009;. Cornelissen et al (2009) provide a detailed review of existing research in dynamic analyses for program comprehension.…”