Requirements

These are the requirements and design goals for the Mensurae system.  These are derived from the use cases for the framework.

The actual design of the system will be expressed using notation that was explicitly designed for describing computation.

• Data: Expected sizes

  The expected (order-of-magnitude) size of Mensurae-generated data.

• Data: Graph Structure

  Designing for graph-structured data from the start.

• Data: Overall Requirements

  Formats, APIs and compatibility for Mensurae-generated data.

• Data: User-Extensible Formats

  Design for extensibility from the start.

• Handling Disparate Architectures

  Working with machines with differing endianness and word size.

• Documentation: Classification

  Types of documentation needed for the project to be usable.

• Documentation: Source Formats

  The format of choice for authoring project documentation.

• Handling Time

  Issues in handling time.

• Hardware Support

  The technical and community aspects of hardware support.

• Interoperability & Standards

  Working with existing tools and frameworks.

• Fine-grained control of measurement

  The ability to turn on and off measurement in select regions of code.

• Analysis of Production Software

  Being able to analyze released (non-debug) software

• Query Language

  Expressive querying of traces.

• Small Systems

  Mensurae on small devices.

• Tooling and Library Centric Design

  Making analysis applications easy to write.