Section: Application Domains

Exploitation of execution traces

Keywords: log analysis, data mining, embedded systems

We have an ongoing collaborations with STMicroelectronics, which is one of the world top-5 electronic chip makers. Nowadays, set-top boxes, smartphones or onboard car computers are powered by highly integrated chips called System-on-Chip (SoC). Such chips contain on a single die processing units, memories, IO units and specialized accelerators (such as audio and video encoding/decoding). Programming SoC is a hard task due to their inherent parallelism, leading to subtle bugs when several components do not deliver their results within a given time frame. Existing debuggers and profilers are ill-adapted in this case because of their high intrusivity that modifies the timings. Hence the most used technique is to capture a trace of the execution and analyze it post-mortem. While Alexandre Termier was in Grenoble he initiated several works for analyzing such traces with data mining techniques [71] , [65] , which he is now pursuing with his colleagues of the Dream project-team [24] .