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Analyzing execution traces: critical-path analysis and distance analysis

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. We do not precisely specify the execution semantics of the system as this is out of scope. What matters are the execution traces that are produced by the system.

  2. Sometimes w can be derived by static analysis of the model. For instance, it could be bound by the cardinality of a maximal antichain in the application task graph or by the number of resources in the platform. In general, however, w can only be determined by examination of the execution trace.

  3. This assumption is not limiting because the task graph can have an arbitrary set of additional task executions that can be inserted between the task executions of the application graph. It, therefore, can delay application task executions arbitrarily.

  4. From now on we use task instead of task execution for brevity.

  5. Of course, it is very hard to guarantee beforehand that adding small random numbers to the execution time of tasks does not significantly change the system behavior. Significant changes by very small variations in the model, however, are a sign of limited robustness, which should be subject of analysis anyhow.

  6. We liberally skip the duration part of the approximated task graph definition to avoid more notation.

  7. Note that these execution traces are job dependent. Furthermore, we have ensured that the execution of the individual tasks is free from interference from other tasks to get the nominal execution time.

  8. The fact that sIP3 instances are blocked is not visible in the figure due to the small execution time of sIP3. The console output of the critical-path analysis step in the Trace tool, however, contains this information.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped us to improve the paper. The research is partially carried out as part of the Octo+ program under the responsibility of Embedded Systems Innovation by TNO (TNO-ESI) with Océ Technologies B.V. as the carrying industrial partner. The Octo+ research is supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs. The research reported in this paper is also partially supported by the ARTEMIS joint undertaking under Grant Agreement No. 621439 (ALMARVI).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Embedded Systems Innovation by TNO, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Martijn Hendriks, Jacques Verriet, Twan Basten & Bart Theelen

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Twan Basten & Lou Somers

  3. Océ Technologies B.V., Venlo, The Netherlands

    Marco Brassé & Lou Somers

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  1. Martijn Hendriks
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  4. Bart Theelen
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Correspondence to Martijn Hendriks.

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Hendriks, M., Verriet, J., Basten, T. et al. Analyzing execution traces: critical-path analysis and distance analysis. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 19, 487–510 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-016-0436-z

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