SOFTWARE RESOURCE ARCHITECTURE

Performance is determined by a system's resources and its workload. Some of the resources are software resources which are an aspect of the software architecture; some of them are even created by the software behaviour. This paper describes software resources and resource architecture, and shows how resource architecture can be determined from software architecture and behaviour. The resource architecture is distinct from views of software architecture which describe software components, but it is related to the so-called "execution view" of architecture. The paper considers how resource architecture emerges during design, the relationship of software and hardware resources, some classes of resource architecture, and what they can tell us about system performance. Other uses of resource architecture are, to analyze deadlocks, to understand special software architectures developed for demanding situations, and to analyze how subsystems fit together when they share resources. Resource architecture can be described using description languages (ADLs) developed for software architecture.