NVision-TM: An Environment for the Analysis and Simulation of Complex Architectures

We propose to investigate and design an interactive and practical environment called NVision for modeling, simulation, dynamic reconfiguration, evaluation and visualization of software and system architectures for performance and reliability. NVision will be capable of modeling, simulating, documenting and visualizing the behavior of distributed dynamic systems. NVision will provide interfaces to popular tracing tools for commonly used platforms in order to collect, analyze and import performance data. This will be used to construct software performance models using a popularly used framework and populate model data. In addition to a variety of performance-metric collection and reporting, the simulation engine will support interactive time-based debugging and system inspection, to facilitate insight into the operation of complex protocols and behavior. Standard and programmable plug-in modules will aggregate and propagate key reliability and performance parameters through hierarchy elements for easy visualization and navigation. The standard model can be augmented using a powerful plug-in framework allowing custom definition of (a) components using visual catalogs, (b) component properties using customizable property sheets, and (c) component behavior using an application programming interface in terms of resource-centric operations. NVision will provide a user-friendly environment for independent, hierarchical design, and interactive binding of hardware and software aspects of the system, aiding performance-sizing design decisions. NVision will also offer standard and customizable visualization of results using charts and reports.