Summary form only given. An essential characteristic of embedded systems is real-time, but the commonly used specification techniques do not consider temporal aspects in general like fulfilment of high level timing requirements or dynamic reactions on timing violations. We show a new formal time model that fills this gap: timing requirements specify the timing behaviour of real-time systems. Different models allow the specification of clock properties and the relations between clocks. With this time model, timing requirements as well as the desired properties of the involved clocks can be specified within a formal description technique.

A method for analyzing the functional behavior and the performance of programs in distributed systems is presented. We use hybrid monitoring, a technique which combines advantages of both software monitoring and hardware monitoring. The paper contains a description of a hardware monitor and a software package (ZM4/SIMPLE) which make our concepts available to programmers, assisting them in debugging and tuning of their code. A short survey of related monitor systems highlights the distinguishing features of our implementation. As an application of our monitoring and evaluation system, the analysis of a parallel ray tracing program running on the SUPRENUM multiprocessor is described. It is shown that monitoring and modeling both rely on a common abstraction of a system's dynamic behavior and therefore can be integrated to one comprehensive methodology. This methodology is supported by a set of tools.>

It is often very difficult for programmers of parallel computers to understand how their parallel programs behave at execution time, because there is not enough insight into the interactions between concurrent activities in the parallel machine. Programmers do not only wish to obtain statistical information that can be supplied by profiling, for example. They need to have detailed knowledge about the functional behaviour of their programs. Considering performance aspects, they need timing information as well. Monitoring is a technique well suited to obtain information about both functional behaviour and timing. Global time information is essential for determining the chronological order of events on different nodes of a multiprocessor or of a distributed system, and for determining the duration of time intervals between events from different nodes. A major problem on multiprocessors is the absence of a global clock with high resolution. This problem can be overcome if a monitor system capable of supplying globally valid time stamps is used.