Targeted on-line data extraction with SystemXtract

Complex system-level simulation can produce large amounts of data, of which only portions may be of interest. When experimenting with hybrid prototypes, consisting of physical and simulated components, data logs are generated and inspected in real-time. Storing full data logs would not only require much disk space, it would also require much effort to find special events and related system actions afterwards. Targeted on-line data extraction helps to instantly provide the data of interest. We present SystemXtract, a powerful specification language and tool for on-line data extraction, supporting origin-, valueand dynamic phase-based constrains on the data. The main contribution of this paper is to show how the language can be mapped to a graphbased processing architecture for executing data extraction as specified. Experiments show that the tool-induced overhead in computation time is insignificant and that the realtime execution of the hybrid prototype is not compromised, while the output is reduced to the interesting data.