Living with the Law: Can Automation give us Moore with Less?

Multi-core programming presents developers with a dramatic paradigm shift. Whereas sequential programming largely allowed the decoupling of source from underlying architecture, it is now impossible to develop new patterns and abstractions in isolation from issues of modern hardware utilization. Synchronization and coordination are now manifested at all levels of the software stack, and developers currently lack the essential tools to even partially automate reasoning techniques and system configuration management. As a first stage to addressing this problem, this paper proposes a framework for a tool suite designed to partially automate the acquisition and management of static system visualization in a feedback loop with dynamic execution properties. This model enables developers to find a best fit system configuration, potentially reconciling resource contention and utilization tensions that are critical to multi-core platforms. The application of a prototype of this suite, Deja View, demonstrates how tool support can aid reasoning about causally related sets of changes across system artifacts.