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Palladio provides Version 3.2 of its Software Architecture Simulator

by Michael Stal on Apr 08, 2011 |

Palladio Bench supports architects and developers in deriving quality of software estimations such as performance, reliability, maintainability and development costs from models.

It is one of the key challenges of software development that quality properties such as performance or reliability are only measurable after implementation availability. This often leads to large efforts for code and architecture refactoring. To address this challenge, Palladio enables the simulation of software architectures, given they are modeled in the Palladio Component Model. It promises to integrate

modelling, simulation/analysis, and result viewing in a single software tool

The free software tool in its new version 3.2 is based on Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo). In addition to previous versions it adds several stabilizations and fixes, supports reliability analysis, introduces a new graphical editor and a new workflow engine, as well as a new probe specification framework.

The development of Palladio started in 2003 by the University of Oldenburg and is now being coordinated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and the University of Paderborn. Industry and scientific partners like SAP, ABB, IBM or Oracle have already used the tool or even contributed to its functionality.

According to its developers, Palladio consists of the following components:

The Palladio Component Model (PCM), a detailled meta-model of component-based software architectures.

A component-based software development process (PDF). Palladio is aligned with this process and enables distributed modeling for component-based software development scenarios.

A software architecture simulator: Multiple performance, reliability, maintainability, and cost prediction approaches are combined. The approaches, by means of analyse or simulation, calculate metrics (e.g. response time) from Palladio models (instance of the PCM).

Tool support, the Palladio-Bench implements all aspects of Palladio

All interested can freely download Palladio-Bench release version 3.2. The web pages additionally provide various tutorials, screencasts, and further material.