Parallelism viewpoint: An architecture viewpoint to model parallelism behaviour of parallelism-intensive software systems

The use of parallelism enhances the performance of a software system. However, its excessive use can degrade the system performance. In this report we propose a parallelism viewpoint to optimize the use of parallelism by eliminating unnecessarily used parallelism in legacy systems. The parallelism viewpoint describes parallelism of the system in order to analyze multiple overheads associated with its threads. We use the proposed viewpoint to find parallelism specific performance overheads of an industrial case, a precision critical parallelism-intensive electron microscope software system. Results show that reduction in parallelism requires a profound insight into the thread-model of the system, which can be achieved by using our proposed viewpoint.