A Generic Reification Technique for Object-Oriented Reflective Languages

Computational reflection is gaining interest in practical applications as witnessed by the use of reflection in the Java programming environment and recent work on reflective middleware. Reflective systems offer many different reflection programming interfaces, the so-called Meta-Object Protocols (MOPs). Their design is subject to a number of constraints relating to, among others, expressive power, efficiency and security properties. Since these constraints are different from one application to another, it would be desirable to easily provide specially-tailored MOPs.In this paper, we present a generic reification technique based on program transformation. It enables the selective reification of arbitrary parts of object-oriented meta-circular interpreters. The reification process is of fine granularity: individual objects of the run-time system can be reified independently. Furthermore, the program transformation can be applied to different interpreter definitions. Each resulting reflective implementation provides a different MOP directly derived from the original interpreter definition.     

基于软件体系结构的反射式中间件研究

Internet为分布应用提供了一种开放、动态的运行环境,这要求分布应用的主要基础设施中间件能够支持运行时查看并调整平台内部状态和行为,由此产生了反射式中间件.目前的反射式中间件研究与实践存在3个不足:注重系统局部或单个实体的反射而缺乏全局视图;注重中间件平台内部功能的反射,而对上层应用的反射不够;集中于CORBA平台,而对J2EE平台的反射性研究较少.介绍了一个反射式的J2EE应用服务器PKUAS.基于构件化的平台内部体系结构,PKUAS引入软件体系结构作为全局视图以实现反射体系对系统整体的表示和控制,作为J2EE应用服务器,PKUAS可反射底层平台以及上层EJB构件.同时,以PKUAS实时监控工具为例,探讨了如何利用基于软件体系结构的反射体系管理整个系统,并给出了PKUAS与其他几种反射式中间件的比较.该工作有效地解决了现阶段反射式中间件研究的不足,提高了反射式中间件的实用性.     

A metalogic programming approach: language,semantics and applications

Abstract

This paper presents a logic programming language of novel conception, called Reflective Prolog, which allows declarative metaknowledge representation and metareasoning. The language is defined by augmenting pure Prolog (Horn clauses) with capabilities of self-reference and logical reflection. Self-reference is designed as a quotation device (a carefully defined naming relation) which allows the construction of metalevel terms that refer to object-level terms and atoms. Logical reflection is designed as an unquotation mechanism (a distinguished truth predicate) which relates names to what is named, thus extending the meaning of domain predicates. The reflection mechanism is embodied in an extended resolution procedure which automatically switches the context between levels. This implicit reflection relieves the programmer from having to explicitly deal with control aspects of the inference process. The declarative semantics of a Reflective Prolog definite program P is provided in terms of the least reflective Herbrand model of P, characterized by means of a suitable mapping defined over the Herbrand interpretations of P. The extended resolution is proved sound and complete with respect to the least reflective Herbrand model. By illustrating Reflective Prolog solutions to an organic set of problems, and by discussing the main differences with respect to other approaches to logic metaprogramming, we show that the proposed language deploys, within its field of action, greater expressive and inferential power than those available till now. The interpreter of the language has been fully implemented. Because of its enhanced power, logic semantics and working interpreter, Reflective Prolog is offered as a contribution toward making the declarative approach of logic programming applicable to the development of increasingly sophisticated knowledge-based systems.     

Reflection and time-dependent computing: Experiences with the R2 architecture

In this paper we present an application of computational reflection in the programming oftime-dependent systems. A time-dependent system performs its tasks according to timing specifications specified within the system or imposed from outside the system. Reflective techniques can be applied to programming time-dependent systems because (1) some application programs require the introduction of a new language construct for specifying timing requirements and (2) different applications may require domain-specific scheduling algorithms. To allow a programmer to add or modify language constructs or scheduling algorithms, however, a clear reflective architecture and program interfaces must be provided. This paper proposes a concurrent object-based reflective architecture (R ² architecture) for time-dependent computing. This architecture is based on anindividual reflection scheme and introduces new meta-level objects (real-time meta objects) that are responsible for time-dependent capabilities. An alarm-clock object and a scheduler object are introduced, and message protocols between them and real-time meta objects are defined. We implemented this architecture on ABCL/R2 and created the Sampled Sound Player program as an application. With this application we provided three different scheduler objects and measured the impact of different scheduling algorithms on sound playback. The measured results show that a scheduler with more complex computations at the meta level exhibited less scheduling overhead, thus was capable of better sound playback. The other example, Time-dependent Graceful Degradation Scheme, demonstrates the programming of functionality degradation triggered by failure to satisfy timing specifications.     

Mirror‐based reflection in AmbientTalk

This paper introduces a novel mechanism to perform intercession (a form of reflection) in an object‐oriented programming language with the goal of making the language extensible from within itself. The proposed mechanism builds upon a mirror‐based architecture, leading to a reusable reflective application programming interface that cleanly separates interface from implementation details. However, support for intercession has been limited in contemporary mirror‐based architectures. This is due to the fact that mirror‐based architectures only support reflection explicitly triggered by metaprograms, while intercession requires reflection implicitly triggered by the language interpreter. This work reconciles mirrors with intercession in the context of an actor‐based, object‐oriented programming language named AmbientTalk. We describe this language's full reflective architecture, highlighting its novel mirror‐based approach to reflect upon both objects and concurrently executing actors. Subsequently, we apply AmbientTalk's mirror‐based reflection to implement two language features, which crucially depend on intercession, to wit future‐type message passing and leased object references. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The mystery of the tower revealed: A nonreflective description of the reflective tower

In an important series of papers [8, 9], Brian Smith has discussed the nature of programs that know about their text and the context in which they are executed. He called this kind of knowledgereflection. Smith proposed a programming language, called 3-LISP, which embodied such self-knowledge in the domain of metacircular interpreters. Every 3-LISP program is interpreted by a metacircular interpreter, also written in 3-LISP. This gives rise to a picture of an infinite tower of metacircular interpreters, each being interpreted by the one above it. Such a metaphor poses a serious challenge for conventional modes of understanding of programming languages. In our earlier work on reflection [4], we showed how a useful species of reflection could be modeled without the use of towers. In this paper, we give a semantic account of the reflective tower. This account is self-contained in the sense that it does not employ reflection to explain reflection.     

一例Java语言与C语言代码运行效率的比较

通过构建一个算法效率测试平台的简易模型,比较Java语言和C语言两种主流语言在实际环境中执行同一算法时所花费时间的区别．揭示C语言在算法效率测试平台上相对于Java语言具有执行速度快、效率高的特点．为程序设计人员在编写算法效率测试平台时选用何种语言进行编程提供了一种参考。     

多Agent系统的上下文感知增强

如今,多agent系统(multi-agent system,简称MAS)被广泛用于开发各种应用系统.当前,开放、动态、难控的计算平台要求软件系统能够根据系统自身及其环境状态信息及其改变,动态地调节自身的行为,即具备一定的上下文感知能力.然而,现有工作并未就如何向既有的MAS应用系统引入上下文感知能力提出有效的解决方案.依照关注分离原则,结合面向上下文程序设计技术(context-oriented programming,简称COP)、反射技术(reflection)以及代码植入技术(code instrumentation),提出了一套MAS系统上下文感知增强框架和底层支撑技术.开发人员可以在既有应用源码不可得的情况下,自动地将指定agent类型转换为(扩展为)具有上下文感知能力的agent类型.此外,利用底层运行支撑环境,系统管理员可以在系统运行时刻动态地调整指定agent的上下文感知行为.     

Reflective Designs — An Overview

We render runtime system adaptations by design-level concepts such that running systems can be adapted and examined at a higher level of abstraction. The overall idea is to express design decisions as applications of design operators to be carried out at runtime. Design operators can implement design patterns for use at runtime. Applications of design operators are made explicit as design elements in the running system such that they can be traced, reconfigured, and made undone.Our approach enables Reflective Designs: on one side, design operators employ reflection to perform runtime adaptations; on the other side, design elements provide an additional reflection protocol to examine and configure performed adaptations. Our approach helps understanding the development and the maintenance of the class of software systems that cannot tolerate downtime or frequent shutdown-revise-startup cycles.We have accumulated a class library for programming with Reflective Designs in Squeak/Smalltalk. This library employs reflection and dynamic aspect-oriented programming. We have also implemented tool support for navigating in a system that is adapted continuously at runtime.Note: This extended abstract summarises our full paper [Hirschfeld, R. and R. Lämmel, Reflective Designs, IEE Proceedings Software (2004), Special Issue on Reusable Software Libraries. To appear. Available at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/rd/].     

CodeCloud: A platform to enable execution of programming models on the Clouds

This paper presents a platform that supports the execution of scientific applications covering different programming models (such as Master/Slave, Parallel/MPI, MapReduce and Workflows) on Cloud infrastructures. The platform includes (i) a high-level declarative language to express the requirements of the applications featuring software customization at runtime, (ii) an approach based on virtual containers to encapsulate the logic of the different programming models, (iii) an infrastructure manager to interact with different IaaS backends, (iv) a configuration software to dynamically configure the provisioned resources and (v) a catalog and repository of virtual machine images. By using this platform, an application developer can adapt, deploy and execute parallel applications agnostic to the Cloud backend.     

An embeddable mobile agent platform supporting runtime code mobility,interaction and coordination of mobile agents and host systems

Agent technology is emerging as an important concept for the development of distributed complex systems. A number of mobile agent systems have been developed in the last decade. However, most of them were developed to support only Java mobile agents. In order to provide distributed applications with code mobility, this article presents a library, the Mobile-C library, that allows a mobile agent platform, Mobile-C, to be embeddable in an application to support mobile C/C++ codes carried by mobile agents. Mobile-C uses a C/C++ interpreter as its Agent Execution Engine (AEE). Through the Mobile-C library, Mobile-C can be embedded into an application to support mobile C/C++ codes carried by mobile agents. Using mobile C/C++ codes, it is easy to interface a variety of low-level hardware devices and legacy systems. Through the Mobile-C library, Mobile-C can run on heterogeneous platforms with various operating systems. The Mobile-C library has a small footprint to meet the stringent memory capacity for applications in mechatronic and embedded systems. The Mobile-C library contains different categories of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in both binary and agent spaces to facilitate the design of mobile agent based applications. In addition, a rich set of existing APIs for the C/C++ interpreter employed as the AEE allows an application to have complete information and control over the mobile C/C++ codes residing in Mobile-C. With the synchronization mechanism provided by the Mobile-C library for both binary and agent spaces, simultaneous processes across both spaces can be coordinated to get correct runtime order and avoid unexpected race condition. The study of performance comparisons indicates that Mobile-C is about two times faster than JADE in agent migration. The application of the Mobile-C library is illustrated by dynamic runtime control of a mobile robot’s behavior using mobile agents.     

一种支持多种访存技术的CBEA片上多核MPI并行编程模型

现有的CBEA(Cell Broadband Engine Architecture)编程模型多侧重于支持类似于流处理的"批量访存"(Bulk Data Transfer)应用,传统非规则访存应用性能较低.文中基于Cell架构提出了一种同时支持"批量访存"与非规则访存应用的MPI并行编程模型,将通信分解在PPE(PowerPC Processing Element)上,拓宽模型的适用范围;在统一访存接口下,通过运行时访存剖分信息指导选择和优化访存以提高计算效率.实验结果表明,文中提出的编程模型支持多种访存模式并具有很好的并行加速比,可获得较同类相关技术30%~50%左右的性能提升.     

An Access Control Framework for Reflective Middleware

Reflective middleware opens up the implementation details of middleware platform and applications at runtime for improving the adaptability of middleware-based systems. However,such openness brings new challenges to access control of the middleware-based systems. Some users can access the system via reflective entities,which sometimes cannot be protected by access control mechanisms of traditional middleware. To deliver high adaptability securely,reflective middleware should be equipped with proper access control mechanisms for potential access control holes induced by reflection. One reason of integrating these mechanisms in reflective middleware is that one goal of reflective middleware is to equip applications with reflection capabilities as transparent as possible. This paper studies how to design a reflective J2EE middleware - PKUAS with access control in mind. At first,a computation model of reflective system is built to identify all possible access control points induced by reflection. Then a set of access control mechanisms,including the wrapper of MBeans and a hierarchy of Java class loaders,are equipped for controlling the identified access control points. These mechanisms together with J2EE access control mechanism form the access control framework for PKUAS. The paper evaluates the security and the performance overheads of the framework in quality and quantity.     

The use of adapters to support interoperability of components for reusability

Interoperability of heterogeneous applications is defined as the ability for multiple software applications written in different programming languages running on different platforms with different operating systems to communicate and interact with one another over different computer networks. The emerging middleware technologies, including CORBA, COM/DCOM, and Enterprise JavaBeans offer an industrial defacto standard communication infrastructure to support the interoperability of heterogeneous applications in components. However, the implementation of a component suffers from high interaction complexities in the component that seriously degrades the application independence. Software components should be built to be independent of the context in which they are used, allowing them to be reused in many different computing environments. In this paper, we are presenting an adapter to isolate, encapsulate, and manage a component's interactions outside the component. The dynamic interface binding was designed to allow an adapter to examine the signature of the requested services at runtime such as operation names, parameters orders, parameters types, and parameters sizes. The interfaces of interconnecting components are bound at runtime. In addition, the interface language mapping allows an interface in a specific programming language to be automatically generated from an IDL interface. The use of adapters increases the reusability of components and also simplifies the integration of the components to an application.     

Design and initial performance of a high-level unstructured mesh framework on heterogeneous parallel systems

OP2 is a high-level domain specific library framework for the solution of unstructured mesh-based applications. It utilizes source-to-source translation and compilation so that a single application code written using the OP2 API can be transformed into multiple parallel implementations for execution on a range of back-end hardware platforms. In this paper we present the design and performance of OP2’s recent developments facilitating code generation and execution on distributed memory heterogeneous systems. OP2 targets the solution of numerical problems based on static unstructured meshes. We discuss the main design issues in parallelizing this class of applications. These include handling data dependencies in accessing indirectly referenced data and design considerations in generating code for execution on a cluster of multi-threaded CPUs and GPUs. Two representative CFD applications, written using the OP2 framework, are utilized to provide a contrasting benchmarking and performance analysis study on a number of heterogeneous systems including a large scale Cray XE6 system and a large GPU cluster. A range of performance metrics are benchmarked including runtime, scalability, achieved compute and bandwidth performance, runtime bottlenecks and systems energy consumption. We demonstrate that an application written once at a high-level using OP2 is easily portable across a wide range of contrasting platforms and is capable of achieving near-optimal performance without the intervention of the domain application programmer.     

C＋＋在嵌入式应用中的安全问题

近年来,C＋＋语言的重要性显著提升,被用于各种苛刻环境下的嵌入式系统中。这很大程度上是因为它与生俱来的灵活性,它所得到的广泛支持和它在多种多样硬件环境之间的移植潜力。然而没有一门编程语言可以保证最终生成的执行代码运行之后和开发人员的初衷完全一致。MISRAC＋＋：2008专注于在嵌入式应用中改善使用C＋＋语言时的安全特性。本文对MISRAC＋＋：2008作了概括的介绍,供嵌入式系统应用工程师学习参考。     

An integrated fine-grain runtime system for MPI

Fine-grain MPI (FG-MPI) extends the execution model of MPI to allow for interleaved execution of multiple concurrent MPI processes inside an OS-process. It provides a runtime that is integrated into the MPICH2 middleware and uses light-weight coroutines to implement an MPI-aware scheduler. In this paper we describe the FG-MPI runtime system and discuss the main design issues in its implementation. FG-MPI enables expression of function-level parallelism, which along with a runtime scheduler, can be used to simplify MPI programming and achieve performance without adding complexity to the program. As an example, we use FG-MPI to re-structure a typical use of non-blocking communication and show that the integrated scheduler relieves the programmer from scheduling computation and communication inside the application and brings the performance part outside of the program specification into the runtime.