Design of a Performance Technology Infrastructure to Support the Construction of Responsive Software

The construction of software that meets its performance objectives is a challenging task considering the distributed nature of modern architectures. Although substantial progress is being made in areas of performance technology, a breakthrough in the wider use of prediction tools during the software development process still remains to be seen. Lack of integration and standardization is one of the reasons for the slow adoption of the performance technology. This paper presents the design of a Performance Technology Infrastructure (PTI), an integration environment for hardware models, workload descriptions, and performance analysis tools. PTI includes a workload specification library, a model evaluation engine, and an interface to external hardware models. PTI components interact with XML scripts based on the syntax of predefined schemas that can be extended to include the requirements of new components incorporated into the system. A prototype implementation of a performance prediction tool is also introduced. It includes third party hardware models, a performance specification language, and an analysis tool. Performance predictions for the Sweep3D application running on a PC cluster are obtained and analyzed to demonstrate the tool’s capabilities.