Theory of Modules

Because large-scale software development is a struggle against internal program complexity, the modules into which programs are divided play a central role in software engineering. A module encapsulating a data type allows the programmer to ignore both the details of its operations, and of its value representations. It is a primary strength of program proving that as modules divide a program, making it easier to understand, so do they divide its proof. Each module can be verified in isolation, then its internal details ignored in a proof of its use. This paper describes proofs of module abstractions based on functional semantics, and contrasts this with the Alphard formalism based on Hoare logic.     

集成保护和分散式抽象的可扩展操作系统

1 概述传统操作系统为程序员的开发应用提供了两个特别的好处:抽象和保护。抽象提供了一个很方便的硬件接口,使用抽象来虚拟资源以支持共享,使用户产生了没有共享资源的错觉,提高了系统的一致性并增强了功能。选择哪一种内核抽象是很重要的,通常每种类型只有一种单一的抽象支持,并且该抽象通常是难以扩展或替代的;为了支持系统的完整性,防止     

Delta abstractions: A technique for managing database states in runtime debugging of active database rules

Delta abstractions are introduced as a mechanism for managing database states during the execution of active database rules. Delta abstractions build upon the use of object deltas, capturing changes to individual objects through a system-supported, collapsible type structure. The object delta structure is implemented using object-oriented concepts such as encapsulation and inheritance so that all database objects inherit the ability to transparently create and manage delta values. Delta abstractions provide an additional layer to the database programmer for organizing object deltas according to different language components that induce database changes, such as methods and active rules. As with object deltas, delta abstractions are transparently created and maintained by the active database system. We define different types of delta abstractions as views of object deltas and illustrate how the services of delta abstractions can be used to inspect the state of active rule execution. An active rule analysis and debugging tool has been implemented to demonstrate the use of object deltas and delta abstractions for dynamic analysis of active rules at runtime.     

The impact of distributed programming abstractions on application energy consumption

With battery capacities remaining a key physical constraint for mobile devices, energy efficiency has become an important software design consideration. Distributed programming abstractions (e.g., sockets, RPC, messages, etc.) are an essential component of modern software, but their energy consumption characteristics are poorly understood. The programmer has few practical guidelines to choose the right abstraction for energy-constrained scenarios. In this article, we report on the findings of a systematic study we conducted to compare and contrast major distributed programming abstractions in terms of their energy consumption patterns. By varying the abstractions with the rest of the functionality fixed, we measure and analyze the impact of distributed programming abstractions on application energy consumption. Based on our findings, we present a set of practical guidelines for the programmer to select an abstraction that satisfies the energy consumption constraints in place. Our other guidelines can steer future efforts in creating energy efficient distributed programming abstractions.     

Efficient Run-Time Support for Irregular Block-Structured Applications

Parallel implementations of scientific applications often rely on elaborate dynamic data structures with complicated communication patterns. We describe a set of intuitive geometric programming abstractions that simplify coordination of irregular block-structured scientific calculations without sacrificing performance. We have implemented these abstractions in KeLP, a C++ run-time library. KeLP's abstractions enable the programmer to express complicated communication patterns for dynamic applications and to tune communication activity with a high-level, abstract interface. We show that KeLP's flexible communication model effectively manages elaborate data motion patterns arising in structured adaptive mesh refinement and achieves performance comparable to hand-coded message-passing on several structured numerical kernels.     

Chunks and Tasks: A programming model for parallelization of dynamic algorithms

We propose Chunks and Tasks, a parallel programming model built on abstractions for both data and work. The application programmer specifies how data and work can be split into smaller pieces, chunks and tasks, respectively. The Chunks and Tasks library maps the chunks and tasks to physical resources. In this way we seek to combine user friendliness with high performance. An application programmer can express a parallel algorithm using a few simple building blocks, defining data and work objects and their relationships. No explicit communication calls are needed; the distribution of both work and data is handled by the Chunks and Tasks library. This makes efficient implementation of complex applications that require dynamic distribution of work and data easier. At the same time, Chunks and Tasks imposes restrictions on data access and task dependencies that facilitate the development of high performance parallel back ends. We discuss the fundamental abstractions underlying the programming model, as well as performance, determinism, and fault resilience considerations. We also present a pilot C++ library implementation for clusters of multicore machines and demonstrate its performance for irregular block-sparse matrix–matrix multiplication.     

Program entanglement,feature interaction and the feature language extensions

One of the most difficult tasks in software development is that the programmer must implement a feature going through a laborious and error prone process of modifying the programs of other features. The programs of the different features entangle in the same reusable program units of the programming language, making them also difficult to be verified, maintained and reused. We show that if (C1) the features interact, (C2) they are executed by the same process and (C3) they are implemented in a programming language that requires the programmer to specify execution flows, program entanglement is inevitable and the problem cannot be solved by software design alone. Applications with interacting features are common including those that require exception handling.The feature language extensions (FLX) is a set of programming language constructs designed to enable the programmer to develop interacting features as separate and reusable program modules even though the features interact. The programmer uses FLX to specify non-procedural program units, organize the program units into reusable features and integrate features into executable feature packages. He develops a feature based on a model instead of the code of other features. FLX supports an automatic procedure to detect the interaction condition among features; the programmer then resolve the interaction in a feature package without changing feature code. FLX features and feature packages are reusable; the programmer may package different combinations of them and resolve their interactions differently to meet different user needs. An FLX to Java compiler has been implemented; our experience of using it has been very positive.     

Parents are shared parts of objects: Inheritance and encapsulation in SELF

The design of inheritance and encapsulation in SELF, an object-oriented language based on prototypes, results from understanding that inheritance allows parents to be shared parts of their children. The programmer resolves ambiguities arising from multiple inheritance by prioritizing an object's parents. Unifying unordered and ordered multiple inheritance supports differential programming of abstractions and methods, combination of unrelated abstractions, unequal combination of abstractions, and mixins. In SELF, a private slot may be accessed if the sending method is a shared part of the receiver, allowing privileged communication between related objects. Thus, classless SELF enjoys the benefits of class-based encapsulation.This work has been generously supported by National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Grant #CCR-8657631, and by Sun Microsystems, IBM, Apple Computer, Cray Laboratories, Tandem Computers, NCR, Texas Instruments, and DEC.     

Kokkos: Enabling manycore performance portability through polymorphic memory access patterns

The manycore revolution can be characterized by increasing thread counts, decreasing memory per thread, and diversity of continually evolving manycore architectures. High performance computing (HPC) applications and libraries must exploit increasingly finer levels of parallelism within their codes to sustain scalability on these devices. A major obstacle to performance portability is the diverse and conflicting set of constraints on memory access patterns across devices. Contemporary portable programming models address manycore parallelism (e.g., OpenMP, OpenACC, OpenCL) but fail to address memory access patterns. The Kokkos C++ library enables applications and domain libraries to achieve performance portability on diverse manycore architectures by unifying abstractions for both fine-grain data parallelism and memory access patterns. In this paper we describe Kokkos’ abstractions, summarize its application programmer interface (API), present performance results for unit-test kernels and mini-applications, and outline an incremental strategy for migrating legacy C++ codes to Kokkos. The Kokkos library is under active research and development to incorporate capabilities from new generations of manycore architectures, and to address a growing list of applications and domain libraries.     

Theorem proving with abstraction

A class of mappings called abstractions are defined, and examples of abstractions are given. These functions map a set S of clauses onto a possibly simpler set T of clauses. Also, resolution proofs from S map onto possibly simpler resolution proofs from T. In order to search for a proof of a clause C from S, it suffices to search for a proof from T and attempt to invert the abstraction mapping to obtain a proof of C from S. Some theorem proving strategies based on this idea are presented. Most of these strategies are complete. A method of using more than one abstraction at the same time is also presented. This requires the use of ‘multiclauses’, which are multisets of literals, and associated ‘m-abstraction mappings’ on multiclauses. Certain abstractions are especially interesting, because they correspond to particular interpretations of the set S of clauses. The use of abstractions permits the advantages of set-of-support strategies to be realized in arbitrary complete non set-of-support resolution strategies.     

Semantic-Aware Automatic Parallelization of Modern Applications Using High-Level Abstractions

Automatic introduction of OpenMP for sequential applications has attracted significant attention recently because of the proliferation of multicore processors and the simplicity of using OpenMP to express parallelism for shared-memory systems. However, most previous research has only focused on C and Fortran applications operating on primitive data types. Modern applications using high-level abstractions, such as C++ STL containers and complex user-defined class types, are largely ignored due to the lack of research compilers that are readily able to recognize high-level object-oriented abstractions and leverage their associated semantics. In this paper, we use a source-to-source compiler infrastructure, ROSE, to explore compiler techniques to recognize high-level abstractions and to exploit their semantics for automatic parallelization. Several representative parallelization candidate kernels are used to study semantic-aware parallelization strategies for high-level abstractions, combined with extended compiler analyses. Preliminary results have shown that semantics of abstractions can help extend the applicability of automatic parallelization to modern applications and expose more opportunities to take advantage of multicore processors.     

Reusable components and assembly design of data processing systems

The paper discusses the features of the assembly programming environment for data processing systems with enhanced reusability of software modules. Types of abstractions are proposed that make it possible to accumulate and use application development experience in the form of reusable components for automatic program generation.Translated from Kibernetika, No. 6, pp. 33–35, November–December, 1989.     

Object‐oriented wrappers for the Linux kernel

Linux is an open‐source operating system, which has increased in its popularity and size since its birth. Various studies have been conducted in literature on the evolution of the Linux kernel, which have shown that there are considerable maintenance problems arising out of the coupling issues in the Linux kernel and this may hamper the evolution of the kernel in future. We propose an object‐oriented (OO) wrapper‐based approach to Linux kernel to provide OO abstractions to external modules. As the major growth of the size of the Linux kernel is in device drivers, our approach provides substantial benefits in terms of developing the device drivers in C++, although the kernel is in C. Providing reusability and extensibility features to device drivers improves the maintainability of the kernel. The OO wrappers provide several benefits to module developers in terms of understandability, development ease, support for OO modules, etc. The design and implementation of C++ wrappers for Linux kernel and the performance of a device driver re‐engineered in C++ are presented in this paper. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EuList threads: A concurrency toolbox

Many current high level languages have been designed with support for concurrency in mind, providing constructs for the programmer to build explicit parallelism into a program. TheEuLisp threads mechanism, in conjunction with locks, and a generic event waiting operation provides a set of primitive tools with which such concurrency abstractions can be constructed. The object system (Telos) provides a powerful approach to building and controlling these abstractions. We provide a synopsis of this concurrency toolbox, and demonstrate the construction of a number of established abstractions using the facilities ofEuLisp: pcall, futures, stack groups, channels, CSP and Linda.     

Visual programming support for graph‐oriented parallel/distributed processing

GOP is a graph‐oriented programming model which aims at providing high‐level abstractions for configuring and programming cooperative parallel processes. With GOP, the programmer can configure the logical structure of a parallel/distributed program by constructing a logical graph to represent the communication and synchronization between the local programs in a distributed processing environment. This paper describes a visual programming environment, called VisualGOP, for the design, coding, and execution of GOP programs. VisualGOP applies visual techniques to provide the programmer with automated and intelligent assistance throughout the program design and construction process. It provides a graphical interface with support for interactive graph drawing and editing, visual programming functions and automation facilities for program mapping and execution. VisualGOP is a generic programming environment independent of programming languages and platforms. GOP programs constructed under VisualGOP can run in heterogeneous parallel/distributed systems. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Program Behavior at the Symbolic Level

No application programmer writes machine-language programs–i.e., strings of ones and zeroes. That primitive pursuit has long been reserved for those few who create the very first modules of a software system for new hardware. Instead, programmers make use of a wide spectrum of symbolic programming languages, ranging from assembly code to high-level languages such as Fortran, Cobol, and the Algol family. Every programming language has semantics which define some abstract machine. For the assembly-language programmer this machine bears a great resemblance to the actual hardware on which the program will be interpreted, but even here the programmer will frequently use system-defined subroutines or macros which represent extensions of the base hardware facilities. The high-level language programmer's abstract machine reflects the control mechanisms and data structures characteristic of the language. The Fortran programmer, for example, can think in terms of multidimensional array structures, DO loops, subprogram facilities, and so on. In principle he need never be concerned with the manner in which his abstract Fortran machine is to be realized by a particular hardware and software system. The user of a modern electronic hand calculator needs no knowledge of the works inside the box, and a modern high-level language system should present to its users an equally consistent environment, completely defined in terms of the syntax and semantics of the source language.     

Microprocessors and software design tools

Software development aids available to the programmer are introduced. Application programs can be broken down into almost independent software modules. Each module can be independently developed and its interface with other modules defined. Microprocessor development systems, software components and future software are discussed. It seems that changes in computer system architecture are inevitable as LSI technology spreads computing, but this will also lead to better, more reliable software development tools.     

Abstraction hierarchies in top-down design

This paper describes a program design discipline that has successfully produced well-modularized programs. The basic approach is to apply, in a uniform way, the concepts of data and procedural abstraction in a top-down decomposition during the initial programming-in-the-large phase of construction. This combination of data and procedural abstraction, called hybrid abstraction, views the system as composed almost entirely of abstract objects. The resulting structural design is partially expressed as a syntactic specification for a set of modules (a module being a set of objects) having no directly shared global data. In addition to the syntactic specification, the design expresses the abstract type decomposition and the structural relationships of the modules. Three relations on the set of modules define the hierarchies is called by, implements, and obtains resources from. These relations define the discipline and characterize the class of designs possible. Modules in practice are used in two different ways: single-instance use and multiple-instance use. Abstract objects can be of two different kinds: collection objects and singular objects. The relationships of these variations in module construction are illustrated. Three moderately large examples are shown. euclid is used to illustrate the discipline.