Section: New Results

Evaluation and optimal dimensioning of real-time systems

• Code analyses and advanced visualization of software in real-time

  Participants: Pierre Caserta, Olivier Zendra

  Last years, strong developments for our instrumentation, tracer and analyzer, had been performed, allowing us to really enter the experimental phase and getting first interesting results. A thorough state of the art had also been written.

  This state of the art paper had finally been published in TVCG, a leading journal in computer visualization. Thanks to the experimental setup efforts of previous years, we had been able in 2011 to conduct good experiments. We had designed and implemented a new way to visualize relations between software elements. These relations include static relations (is-a, direct heir, caller, callee, etc.) and dynamic ones (runtime caller, runtime callee). Our new relation visualization comprises a new way of placing way points so as to significantly decrease spatial and visual clutter when visualizing software systems with large numbers (thousands up to millions) of relations. This had lead to a publication in VISSOFT, one of the most recognized conferences in the software visualization domain, as well as a Best Poster in ECOOP, one of the most recognized conferences in the object-oriented domain. The important design and implementation work we had realized on the tracing and analysis software also lead to the publication of our method in ICOOOLPS 2011.

  This year, in 2012, we published our instrumentation and tracing method in Elsevier's Science of Computer Programming journal [9] .

  Work has been going onto analyze polymorphism in Java programs, answering an apparently simple yet so far unanswered question: how much polymorphism is there actually in Java programs. This is of paramount importance, since a lot of work occur around polymorphism, which is an important concept, but no one is currently able to tell how much it impact programs in real life. We have begun writing this paper in cooperation with the LIRMM lab in Montpellier. In addition, we are in the process of finishing work pertaining to analyzing program evolutions, looking at differences between versions, and analyzing how dynamic metrics and static metrics correlate to evolution rate.

  Work in this domain has also lead to the writing and successful defense of Pierre Caserta's PhD thesis, titled "Analyse statique et dynamique de code et visualisation des logiciels via la métaphore de la ville : contribution à l'aide à la compréhension des programmes", on 7th December 2012 [7] .

  A web site was also designed to publicize our work on the VITRAIL project.

• Open Power and Energy Optimization PLatform and Estimator

  Participants: Fabrice Vergnaud, Jérôme Vatrinet, Kévin Roussel, Olivier Zendra.

  Work in this domain was performed in the context of the ANR Open-PEOPLE (Open Power and Energy Optimization PLatform and Estimator) project, financed since the very end of 2008. Inria Nancy Grand Est is responsible for the software part of the platform and is involved in memory management for low-power issues. Work in this project begun in April 2009 (kick-off meeting). We have finished setting up the very important infrastructure for the software part of the Open-PEOPLE platform. We have finished expressing the requirements for the platform, in order to start the actual developments and the actual integration of tools provided by the different partners. In 2011, we have finished expressing the platform architecture and user interface (GUI). We have also finished implementing the part of the software platform that is the remote control to the hardware platform. We finally have finished implementing the core of the software platform and canonical models handling. This work lead to several technical and the several presentations and posters in conferences.

  This year was the result harvesting for our project, in terms of development. We finished the design and implementation of the PCMD (Power Consumption Model Development) and the PCAO (Power Consumption Analysis and Optimization) parts of the software platform, as well as the external tools integration work. We also designed and implemented the Open-PEOPE model sharing website. Again, several demos and publications in conferences resulted [13] , [21] , [22] .

• Operator calculus and conceptation of algorithms for optimisatio of multi-constraints problems

  Participants: Jamila Ben Slimane, Hugo Cruz-Sanchez, Bilel Nefzi, René Schott, Ye-Qiong Song

  R. Schott and G. Stacey Staples proposed a solution based on operator calculus for graphs with multi-constraints [26] . These constraints are not necessarily linear or positive. This approach was developed for realistic problems like:

  • configuration of satellites proposing a high-quality coverage [14] ;

  • optimal utilisation of ressources in hospitals;

  • optimal management in sensor networks [25] .

    This work was the result of the collaboration of our team with MADYNES team, LPMA (Laboratoire de Probabilités et Modèles Aléatoires, Paris 6 et 7) and University of Illinois at Edwardsville.