The Chilies project consist of a set of Eclipse plugins to automatically include performance or reliability relevant low-level details to Palladio Component Model instances.

Background

Chilies is named after a hot spice, because "Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor" (Wiliam Cowper). Similarily we automatically include some spice to the models in a form of variable details like, for example, middleware configurations.

Motivation

Problems of performance models:
- "There are many weaknesses in current performance processes. They require heavy effort, which limits what can be attempted. …. There is a semantic gap between performance concerns and functional concerns, which prevents many developers from addressing performance at all. For the same reason many developers do not trust or understand performance models, even if such models are available. …. Performance modeling is effective but it is often costly; models are approximate, they leave out detail that may be important, and are difficult to validate."

Problems of performance prediction tools:
- "… a conflict between automation and adaptability in that systems which are highly automated but are difficult to change, and vice versa."

[ Murray Woodside , Greg Franks , Dorina C. Petriu, The Future of Software Performance Engineering, 2007 Future of Software Engineering, p.171-187, May 23-25, 2007 ]

Solution

The tool takes a complete PCM instance as input and produces new PCM instance by refining the model based on a configuration of variable low level implementation detail (called completion). It uses configuration of completion as a transformation definition understood and automatically generated by higher-order transformation (called HOT). Such refined models are prepared for further analyses of the performance, reliability, maintainability and costs properties. Additionally to the Chilies tool we develop a library of configurable completions to provide a ease the development and increase the understanding of complex prediction models. Actually we focus on a concurrency related constructs. It shall help software architects to include complex extra-functional properties in their models.

The tool is currently being developed at the Chair for Software Design and Quality of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. For details and questions about Chilies, please contact Lucia Kapova.

Team Structure


Lucia Kapova	Ralf Reussner

In cooperation with:


Thomas Goldschmidt	Jens Happe	Bara Buhnova

Subgroups

Chilies Tool Chain Group

Completion Integration Plugin (CIPlugin):
- Thomas Schuischel
- Christoph Kurrat
Higher Order Transformations (HOTs):
- Christian Heupel

Completion Library Group

Completions Development:
- Infrastructure:
- Connectors:
- Components:
  - coming soon!

Documentation

Theses: 2011: Configurable Software Performance Completions through Higher-Order Model Transformations(PDF)

Publications:

Chilies Tool Chain Group

SDQ Library: Chilies Tools: Technical Report : Comming soon!

X???'09: Goal-specific Reusable Templates for Architectural Refinement Transformations. (PDF)

SEAA EUROMICRO'09: Automated feature model-based generation of refinement transformations. (PDF)

QoSA'10: Statistical Inference of Software Performance Models for Parametric Performance Completions.(PDF)

Completion Library Group

QoSA'10: Evaluating Maintainability with Code Metrics for Model-to-Model Transformations. (PDF)

FESCA'10: Systematic refinement of performance models for concurrent component-based systems. (PDF)

WOSP/SIPEW'10: State Dependence in Performance Evaluation of Component-Based Software Systems. (PDF)

Download / Install / Use

Coming soon!

current development drops:

CIP, FeatureModel, FeatureConfig and CompletionFeatureModel plugins

RSA models

ecore models

Reports and Discussions

Stateful Components in MDSPE:
- Stateful Software Performance Enginering

Quality Metrics for Model-to-Model Transformations:
- Quality Metrics for Transformation

Screenshots

Coming soon!

Example Models

Coming soon!