Towards optimisation of model queries : A parallel execution approach

The growing size of software models poses significant scalability challenges. Amongst these challenges is the execution time of queries and transformations. In many cases, model management programs are (or can be) expressed as chains and combinations of core fundamental operations. Most of these operations are pure functions, making them amenable to parallelisation, lazy evaluation and short-circuiting. In this paper we show how all three of these optimisations can be combined in the context of Epsilon: an OCL-inspired family of model management languages. We compare our solutions with both interpreted and compiled OCL as well as hand-written Java code. Our experiments show a significant improvement in the performance of queries, especially on large models

Towards Transparent Combination of Model Management Execution Strategies for Low-Code Development Platforms

International audienceLow-code development platforms are taking an important place in the model-driven engineering ecosystem, raising new challenges, among which transparent efficiency or scalability. Indeed, the increasing size of models leads to difficulties in interacting with them efficiently. To tackle this scalability issue, some tools are built upon specific computational strategies exploiting reactivity, or parallelism. However, their performances may vary depending on the specific nature of their usage. Choosing the most suitable computational strategy for a given usage is a difficult task which should be automated. Besides, the most efficient solutions may be obtained by the use of several strategies at the same time. is paper motivates the need for a transparent multi-strategy execution mode for model-management operations. We present an overview of the different computational strategies used in the model-driven engineering ecosystem, and use a running example to introduce the benefits of mixing strategies for performing a single computation. is example helps us present our design ideas for a multi-strategy model-management system. e code-related and DevOps challenges that emerged from this analysis are also presented

Parallel and Distributed Execution of Model Management Programs

The engineering process of complex systems involves many stakeholders and development artefacts. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to development which aims to help curtail and better manage this complexity by raising the level of abstraction. In MDE, models are first-class artefacts in the development process. Such models can be used to describe artefacts of arbitrary complexity at various levels of abstraction according to the requirements of their prospective stakeholders. These models come in various sizes and formats and can be thought of more broadly as structured data. Since models are the primary artefacts in MDE, and the goal is to enhance the efficiency of the development process, powerful tools are required to work with such models at an appropriate level of abstraction. Model management tasks – such as querying, validation, comparison, transformation and text generation – are often performed using dedicated languages, with declarative constructs used to improve expressiveness. Despite their semantically constrained nature, the execution engines of these languages rarely capitalize on the optimization opportunities afforded to them. Therefore, working with very large models often leads to poor performance when using MDE tools compared to general-purpose programming languages, which has a detrimental effect on productivity. Given the stagnant single-threaded performance of modern CPUs along with the ubiquity of distributed computing, parallelization of these model management program is a necessity to address some of the scalability concerns surrounding MDE. This thesis demonstrates efficient parallel and distributed execution algorithms for model validation, querying and text generation and evaluates their effectiveness. By fully utilizing the CPUs on 26 hexa-core systems, we were able to improve performance of a complex model validation language by 122x compared to its existing sequential implementation. Up to 11x speedup was achieved with 16 cores for model query and model-to-text transformation tasks