Section: Software

ANR Open-PEOPLE platform

Participants : Sophie Alexandre, Jonathan Ponroy, Kévin Roussel, Olivier Zendra.

The aim of Open-PEOPLE is to provide a platform for estimating and optimizing the power and energy consumption of systems. The Open-PEOPLE project formally started in April 2009. Two systems administrator and software developers had been hired initially: Sophie Alexandre and Kévin Roussel. Another system administrator and software developer, Jonathan Ponroy, joined them in 2010 when he finished his work on the ANR MORE project where he worked previously. Sophie Alexandre contract ended in February 2011.

Since the beginning of the Open-PEOPLE project, we had made significant progress in setting up the infrastructure for the software part of the platform, for which INRIA Nancy Grand Est is responsible. We had included new features to be able to fully integrate and test software developed as Eclipse plugins, relying on the Buckminster tool. We had also created a specific extension set for SVN and Hudson, called OPCIM (Open-PEOPLE Continuous Integration Mechanism). OPCIM had been registered at APP on 13/04/2010 with number IDDN.FR.001.150008.000.S.P.2010.000.10000.

Concerning the Open-PEOPLE platform itself, we had first tackled the high-level work, working with our partners on the definition of the requirements of the platform according to the needs of industry. We had then realized the specification work to define the global perimeter of our platform, according to the previous requirements. As part of this work had also been designed exchanges formats between the various tools. We had also designed at INRIA Nancy Grand Est a Tools integration Protocol, which specified requirements for external tools to be integrated in our platform. All this design work had been materialized in several reports which were deliveries provided to ANR.

We had also designed and developed an authentication component (Eclipse plugin) for the platform, so as to be able to provide a unique, secured access gate to the platform to all the tools that are or shall be integrated into it.

We had also started and almost finished developing an Internet portal giving access and control to the Open-PEOPLE Hardware Platform, located at our partner's UBS in Lorient. Our portal features included user account management facilities, on the admin side, and on the user side, the ability to create, save, edit, reuse and of course submit jobs, make reservations for the hardware platform resources and get back tests results.

Finally, we had started working on two important parts of the software platform.

First, a way to unify the user experience despite the fact the platform federates several tools which were not developed to interact together. This implied an important and in-depth study of the wanted ergonomy for the platform, which involved taking into account both user needs and habits and the features of the available software tools.

The second work which had begun in 2011 was the design (then implementation) of the communications of between the various tools of the platform. This skeleton will be a key part of our platform, and the quality of its design will have a tremendous impact on its maintainability and its extensibility.

Note that the Open-PEOPLE project had been successfully evaluated on 14/09/2010 by ANR. Developments done during the first two years in the project are detailed in the 2009 and 2010 activity reports. In 2011, these developments went on.

We continued the work to solidify our development platform supporting our work and that of our partners. We produced a finer grained definition of the software platform functionalities, and a more precise definition of the tools integration protocol. We worked towards the corresponding implementation documents, adding two new delivrables about the architecture of the software platform and the âergonomics of the software platform. For the latter, we extensively interviewed user about ergonomics and designed several GUI mockups. We progressed on the implementation of the software platform, especially with respect to the internet portal to remote-control the hardware platform. We participated to the definition of the hardware platform and its functionalities, and participated actively to the work on the Specification document for HW / SW interfacing. We provided the first concrete design and implementation of the HW/SW platform interfacing, with our implementation of the remote control portal for the HW platform. This remote control module was completed in Fall 2011.

We also participated to the work pertaining to basic components model homogenization, by reviewing this in the context of the software platform architecture and implementation, which resulted in several incremental improvements of the underlying models. Finally, progressing towards the first release of the software part of the Open-PEOPLE platform, we realized an ergonomic study for the consumption laws editors, with mockups and user interviews and validation. We worked on the implementation of the editors for the consumption laws, which required learning new environments and development tools (related to the EMF framework and the AADL, QUDV and MathML models). As a consequence, we completed the implementation of the GUI and engine to create units and quantities. We finalized the architecture needed to integrate external modules in the platform.

With this progress, the first release of the whole Open-PEOPE software platform platform is expected early 2012.