Building a new software system requires careful planning and investigation in order to avoid any problems in the later stages of the development. By using a universally accepted design notation such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), ambiguities in the system specification can be eliminated or minimised. The aspect that frequently needs to be investigated before the implementation stage can be commenced concerns the proposed system’s performance. It is necessary to predict whether a particular design will meet the performance requirement - i.e. is it worth implementing the system - or not. One way to obtain this performance prediction is by using simulation programs to mimic the execution of the system. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to transform the design into a simulation program without some sound knowledge of simulation techniques. In addition, new simulation programs need to be built each time for different systems - which can be tedious, time consuming and error prone. The currently available UML tools do not provide any facilities for generating simulation programs automatically from UML specifications. This shortcoming is the main motivation for this research. The work involved here includes an investigation of which UML design notations can be used; the available simulation languages or environments for running the simulation; and more importantly, a framework that can capture the simulation information from UML design notation. Using this framework, we have built tools that enable an automatic transformation of a UML design notation into a simulation program. Two tools (parsers) that can perform such a transformation have been constructed. We provide case studies to demonstrate the applicability of these tools and the usefulness of our simulation framework in general.

<p>Future operating system vendor support for an office building LAN was investigated in response to the realization that current vendor operating system support of the LAN was going away. Options analyzed that would best preserve the existing functionality of the software applications utilized on the LAN were, (1) to do nothing, (2) utilize another vendor for support and (3) upgrade to the current vendors latest operating system, Solaris 2.2.</p> / Master of Science

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-97). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Ce document retrace mes activités de recherche depuis ma thèse soutenue en juillet 1997. Certains des travaux présentés sont achevés, d'autres sont en cours ou encore dans un stade exploratoire. De 1993 à 1999, je me suis intéressé aux différents aspects du <br />partitionnement logiciel/matériel dans la conception de systèmes intégrés numériques de télécommunications. Depuis 1999, mes travaux ont porté sur la conception de systèmes multiprocesseurs monopuces, et plus particulièrement sur ce qui a trait aux relations entre <br />logiciel et matériel. Ces systèmes sont généralement dédiés à une application ou à une classe d'applications, ce qui permet d'optimiser l'architecture et les programmes. Mes recherches ses sont donc <br />focalisées sur l'architecture mémoire, les interfaces de <br />communication entre composants et le prototypage. Pour ces trois axes de recherche, des méthodes et des outils d'aide à la conception ont été définis et développés. Des travaux toujours en cours portent sur la généralisation d'une méthode de conception de composants d'interface matériels à partir <br />d'une spécification sous forme de services requis et fournis. Une telle spécification est déjà utilisée pour représenter des protocoles dans les réseaux de communication et pour le développement<br />des couches logicielles de communication. Son extension à la conception des interfaces matérielles homogénéiserait les langages, méthodes et outils de l'environnement de conception. Mes travaux futurs s'orientent vers deux axes : l'intégration <br />logiciel/matériel et l'adéquation entre architecture et système d'exploitation. Dans les deux cas, les relations étroites entre les ressources physiques de l'architecture et les couches logicielles qui y accèdent doivent permettre d'améliorer sensiblement les performances.

A frustrating aspect of the frequent changes to large VLSI CAD systems is that so little of the old available programs can be reused. It takes too much time and effort to find the reusable pieces and recast them for the new use. Our thesis is that such systems can be designed for reusability by designing the software as layers of problem oriented languages, which are implemented by suitably extending a "base" language. We illustrate this methodology with respect to VLSI CAD programs and a particular language layer: a language for handling networks. We present two different implementations. The first uses UNIX and Enhanced C. The second approach uses Common Lisp on a Lisp machine.