Tracing Summit coverage

Hi, a Tracing Summit was held lately which should be of interest to your
readership. Copies of the presentations have been assembled online for
the benefits of all,
http://ltt.polymtl.ca/tracingwiki/index.php/Main_Page

The concluding panel summarizes the main findings,
http://ltt.polymtl.ca/tracingwiki/index.php/Concluding_Panel


Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

New electronic services rely on an increasingly sophisticated
infrastructure composed of powerful servers, numerous fixed or mobile
clients, and the system and networking software. The central processing
units have evolved from simple processors, to symmetric multi-processors
(SMP), non-uniform memory access (NUMA) SMPs and more recently
multi-core (SMP on a single chip) systems. Embedded soft and hard
real-time multi-core multi-computer systems are exceedingly difficult to
debug and tune. Many problems, often timing related, only show under
real loads, when the hardware (cache, page tables, synchronization) and
software (operating system, virtual machines, libraries and
applications) are interacting in real-time. The development time of
distributed, online, applications is a major stumbling block for
creating new services. Tools are needed to extract precise, globally
ordered, debugging and performance data while minimizing the overhead on
the systems under test. This data must be made available to suitable
monitoring, visualization and analysis frameworks.

Experts from industry and university present the state of the art in the
area of tracing/monitoring of computer systems, (including distributed
and multi-core systems) and have advanced users present challenging
problems they are facing. This should better adapt the R&D efforts in
the area of diagnostic (security, reliability, accuracy, debugging,
optimization, resource utilisation, timing behaviour) to the real
priorities of industrial and governmental practitioners.