Tracking the changing dynamics of object-oriented frameworks[5], design patterns[7], architectural styles[8], and subsystems during the development and reuse cycle can aid producing complex systems. Unfortunately, current object-oriented programming tools are relatively oblivious to the rich architectural abstractions in a system. This paper shows that architecture-oriented visualization, the graphical presentation of system statics and dynamics in terms of its architectural abstractions, is highly beneficial in designing complex systems. In addition, the paper presents architecture-aware instrumentation, a new technique for building efficient on-line instrumentation to support architectural queries. We demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the scheme with case studies in the design of the Choices object-oriented operating system. 1 Introduction Designers conceive complex systems as architectures with design patterns[7], frameworks[5], architectural styles[8], and subsyste...

Flexibility and user-customizability are amongst the potential benefits of reorganizing and restructuring operating systems using object-orientation. However, operating systems are often designed as black boxes whose internals cannot easily be examined or tailored by the user or application. As a black box, the complexity of an operating system appears to grow as additional features and options are added. We present an "open" visual model for objectoriented operating systems that supports browsing, manipulation, and programming. The model exploits the reification of all operating system mechanisms and policies as classified objects to provide interactive visualization, evaluation, and configuration of specialized services and features. The model supports exploration of the dynamic interaction of subsystems within the operating system including comparisons between the abstract architectural properties of the system like its design patterns[5] and specific specializations and customizati...

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High-level parallel languages ease writing of parallel programs. However, since they deepen the gap between language and underlying hardware, performance debugging is hard. It is essential to use tools that present the user with performance data at the language level. Besides this, for hard performance problems it is necessary to be able to descend into the software hierarchy. A trace package and a viewing tool, orcshot, are presented that address these issues for the high-level parallel language Orca. Communication and synchronization are done with "shared data objects", and the tool visualizes traces in relation to these objects. Orcshot possesses a powerful filter utility to achieve the necessary data reduction. Orcshot can be adapted to other object-based languages with slight effort. The orcshot performance visualization tool has already helped find numerous performance bugs. One example is presented. I. INTRODUCTION To make parallel programming as easy as possible, it is desirab...

Tracking the changing dynamics of object-oriented frameworks[5], design patterns[7], architectural styles[8], and subsystems during the development and reuse cycle can aid producing complex systems. Unfortunately, current object-oriented programming tools are relatively oblivious to the rich architectural abstractions in a system. This paper shows that architecture-oriented visualization, the presentation of system dynamics in terms of its architectural abstractions, is highly beneficial in designing complex systems. In addition, the paper presents architecture-aware instrumentation, a new technique for building efficient on-line instrumentation to support architectural queries. We demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the scheme with case studies in the design of the Choices object-oriented operating system. PageCount: 17 pages without figures and references Category: Research Topic Area: dynamic program analysis; instrumentation, reuse, components and frameworks; softwar...