Benchmark generation using domain specific modeling

Abstract

Performance benchmarks are domain specific applications that are specialized to a certain set of technologies and platforms. The development of a benchmark application requires mapping the performance specific domain concepts to an implementation and producing complex technology and platform specific code. Domain specific modeling (DSM) promises to bridge the gap between application domains and implementations by allowing designers to specify solutions in domain-specific abstractions and semantics through domain specific languages (DSL). This allows generation of a final implementation automatically from high level models. The modeling and task automation benefits obtained from this approach usually justify the upfront cost involved. This paper employs a DSM based approach to invent a new DSL, DSLBench, for benchmark generation. DSLBench and its associated code generation facilities allow the design and generation of a completely deployable benchmark application for performance testing from a high level model. DSLBench is implemented using Microsoft domain specific language toolkit. It is integrated with the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite as a plug-in to provide extra modeling capabilities for performance testing. We illustrate the approach using a case study based on .Net and C#.