Constructing a Resource Usage View of a Large and Complex Software-Intensive System

A resource usage view consists of models that are important assets to analyze and control usage of hardware resources such as processors and memory elements. In this paper, we present the application of a top-down approach to construct a resource usage view using actual system runtime information. The models in this view help to address the concerns of a resource usage viewpoint providing information in terms of system-specific architecture and design execution elements such as execution scenarios, tasks, software components, processes, and threads. As part of our validation, constructing a resource usage view of an MRI system, a representative large software-intensive system, we observed that the constructed models for this view provide useful overviews and insights for practitioners to describe part of the system execution architecture and especially to analyze and evaluate the use of hardware resources in a top-down fashion.