TY - JOUR
T1 - Analyzing execution traces
T2 - critical-path analysis and distance analysis
AU - Hendriks, Martijn
AU - Verriet, Jacques
AU - Basten, Twan
AU - Theelen, Bart
AU - Brassé, Marco
AU - Somers, Lou
PY - 2017/8/1
Y1 - 2017/8/1
N2 - System designers make trade-offs between metrics of interest such as execution time, functional quality and cost to create a properly balanced system. Execution traces, which are sequences of timestamped start and end events of system tasks, are a general and powerful means to understand the system behavior that gives rise to these trade-offs. Such traces can be produced by, e.g., executable models or prototype systems. Their interpretation, however, often is non-trivial. We present two automated analysis techniques that work on execution traces to help the system designer with interpretation. First, critical-path analysis can be used to answer the typical “what is the bottleneck” question, and we extend earlier work of [16] with a technique that uses application information to refine the analysis. Second, we define a pseudo-metric on execution traces, which is useful for calibration and validation purposes, and which can be used to visualize the differences between traces. Both techniques are based on a common graph representation of execution traces. We have implemented our techniques in the Trace visualization tool [12], and have applied them in a case study from the digital printing domain.
AB - System designers make trade-offs between metrics of interest such as execution time, functional quality and cost to create a properly balanced system. Execution traces, which are sequences of timestamped start and end events of system tasks, are a general and powerful means to understand the system behavior that gives rise to these trade-offs. Such traces can be produced by, e.g., executable models or prototype systems. Their interpretation, however, often is non-trivial. We present two automated analysis techniques that work on execution traces to help the system designer with interpretation. First, critical-path analysis can be used to answer the typical “what is the bottleneck” question, and we extend earlier work of [16] with a technique that uses application information to refine the analysis. Second, we define a pseudo-metric on execution traces, which is useful for calibration and validation purposes, and which can be used to visualize the differences between traces. Both techniques are based on a common graph representation of execution traces. We have implemented our techniques in the Trace visualization tool [12], and have applied them in a case study from the digital printing domain.
KW - Critical path
KW - Execution trace
KW - Metric
KW - Model-based design
KW - Visualization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84986269096&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10009-016-0436-z
DO - 10.1007/s10009-016-0436-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84986269096
VL - 19
SP - 487
EP - 510
JO - International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer
JF - International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer
SN - 1433-2779
IS - 4
ER -