Case Studies

This project will focus on useful case studies and has four research axes:

• Compare the performance of different tracing and monitoring tools, including LTTng, Perf, Ftrace, SystemTap and GDB, and examine their integration into the software development toolchain. He will then study how typical applications in the Cloud can be monitored with
  these tools, including Apache, MariaDB, PosrgreSQL and Drupal. By instrumenting and analyzing these diverse applications, the student will uncover any problem with the proposed approach and tools and be in a position to suggest improvements to the proposed tools. In addition, he will propose innovative specialized views for these applications, again validating and demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed tools for developing custom analysis views and monitoring these important infrastructure Open Source Projects.

• Study and instrument complex multi-level applications such as Eclipse and Chromium. He will then study the applicability and performance of the new tools and techniques proposed
  in this project. Both Eclipse and Chromium come with extensive run-time libraries and an elaborate threading model. Eclipse runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine and uses threading extensively. Ericsson has several full time Eclipse developers in Montreal. They will provide useful feedback on the accuracy and relevance of the monitoring data and specialized multi-level views that the proposed tools will offer. Similarly, Chromium embeds a high performance Javascript engine and uses an elaborate threading and sandboxing model. Complex applications such as GMail, running in Javascript within Chromium, are extremely difficult and complex to analyze with the current tools. We are in close contact with the Montreal Google office where significant research and development work is conducted on Chromium optimization. They will also provide us with valuable feedback on the value of the proposed tracing and monitoring tools. The complexity and large developer and user base of these projects make them ideal testbeds to
  evaluate the applicability, efficiency and scalability of the proposed approaches. They are therefore in a unique position to provide excellent feedback to improve further the proposed mechanisms and algorithms.
• Setup a realistic test environment and to communicate back the interesting findings including the setup of the different tools (LTTng, Perf, Ftrace, SystemTap, GDB), environment (OpenStack and OpenDaylight) and applications (Apache, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Drupal, Eclipse and Chromium), and collaboration with the different groups developing these Open Source projects, and in particular with Ericsson (developing TMF), EfficiOS (developing LTTng, UST and Babel trace) and Google Montreal (developing Chromium).
• Setiup and evaluate the different tools, environments and applications, and collaborate with researchers to interface to the test environment and quickly obtain feedback on the efficiency and relevance of their proposed techniques and algorithms.