POD-HOS (Performance Oriented Design-Higher Order Software) Interfaces: An Examination of AXES/POD Relationships and Other Issues.

This report addresses the feasibility of and requirements for interfacing two powerful software engineering tools - POD Performance Oriented Design and HOS High Order Software. POD is a software engineering tool for the life cycle managemetn of system performance. It is a tool which provides a structured machine readable format the System Description File or SDF for representing a systems hardware architecture, software structure and external load demand. Based on this representation, POD provides a vehicle to calculate system performance values such as response time, throughput and device utilization. HOS is a methodology for defining systems in a hardware and language independent manner. It consists of a specification language AXES, which provides mechanisms for defining functions, control structures, and data types, a User System Evaluation and Integration Tool USE.IT, which is a family of tools for defining systems using the AXES language, an Analyzer for analyzing the logical correctness of systems defined in AXES, and a family of RATs Resource Allocation Tools, which translate descriptions from the AXES specification language into target languages such as Fortran and potentially POD. In considering the feasibility of and requirements for interfacing POD and HOS, is assessed in terms of its ability to describe the required POD input specifications. In addition, consideration is given to possible HOS extensions to support POD, and an approach for interfacing these tools is suggested.