Trapper: eliminating performance bottlenecks in a parallel embedded application

The Trapper software-engineering environment for parallel and distributed systems comprises tools for software design, hardware configuration, mapping, monitoring, visualization, and performance tuning of parallel applications and systems. This article´s authors used Trapper as the main software-development tool to realize a complex industrial research application within the Prometheus collision-avoidance project at Daimler-Benz. In this project, they outfitted a Mercedes 500 SEL research vehicle with 18 cameras and approximately 60 computing nodes for various image-processing and control algorithms such as lane following, obstacle detection, and traffic-sign recognition. This article seeks to analyze the behavior and improve the performance of the most time-consuming task of the whole software: traffic-sign recognition. The authors show how Trapper effectively detected and eliminated performance bottlenecks of this parallel application