I recently had the opportunity to visit the CISTER Research Center for Real-time and Embedded Computing in Porto. It was a great chance to reconnect with former colleagues from my previous tenure there. During my visit, I was invited give a presentation focusing on the complexity challenges in high-tech equipment and ESI’s vision on model-driven performance engineering in this field. The talk also highlighted the growing use of microservice architectures in cyber-physical systems to address the complexity drivers. I explained that while there are good open source tools for instrumenting applications and gathering telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces, new automated analysis methods are needed to reduce the effort of optimizing, verifying, and diagnosing system performance. In this context, I introduced a framework for telemetry-based performance engineering that can be used to address a number of performance challenges. In particular, I explained how it could be used to check whether the system implementation conforms to a UML specification, both in terms of timing and behavior, and to perform performance prediction.
The presentation, which was attended by a group of approximately 15 staff members and PhD students, was well-received and led to fruitful discussions about the relation between real-time systems research and performance engineering. . The visit concluded wonderfully with a delightful dinner with the institute’s director, Prof. Eduardo Tovar, in Matosinhos.
