15,455 research outputs found
A Programming Environment Evaluation Methodology for Object-Oriented Systems
The object-oriented design strategy as both a problem decomposition and system development paradigm has made impressive inroads into the various areas of the computing sciences. Substantial development productivity improvements have been demonstrated in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to user interface design. However, there has been very little progress in the formal characterization of these productivity improvements and in the identification of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The development and validation of models and metrics of this sort require large amounts of systematically-gathered structural and productivity data. There has, however, been a notable lack of systematically-gathered information on these development environments. A large part of this problem is attributable to the lack of a systematic programming environment evaluation methodology that is appropriate to the evaluation of object-oriented systems
A synchronous program algebra: a basis for reasoning about shared-memory and event-based concurrency
This research started with an algebra for reasoning about rely/guarantee
concurrency for a shared memory model. The approach taken led to a more
abstract algebra of atomic steps, in which atomic steps synchronise (rather
than interleave) when composed in parallel. The algebra of rely/guarantee
concurrency then becomes an instantiation of the more abstract algebra. Many of
the core properties needed for rely/guarantee reasoning can be shown to hold in
the abstract algebra where their proofs are simpler and hence allow a higher
degree of automation. The algebra has been encoded in Isabelle/HOL to provide a
basis for tool support for program verification.
In rely/guarantee concurrency, programs are specified to guarantee certain
behaviours until assumptions about the behaviour of their environment are
violated. When assumptions are violated, program behaviour is unconstrained
(aborting), and guarantees need no longer hold. To support these guarantees a
second synchronous operator, weak conjunction, was introduced: both processes
in a weak conjunction must agree to take each atomic step, unless one aborts in
which case the whole aborts. In developing the laws for parallel and weak
conjunction we found many properties were shared by the operators and that the
proofs of many laws were essentially the same. This insight led to the idea of
generalising synchronisation to an abstract operator with only the axioms that
are shared by the parallel and weak conjunction operator, so that those two
operators can be viewed as instantiations of the abstract synchronisation
operator. The main differences between parallel and weak conjunction are how
they combine individual atomic steps; that is left open in the axioms for the
abstract operator.Comment: Extended version of a Formal Methods 2016 paper, "An algebra of
synchronous atomic steps
A synchronous program algebra: a basis for reasoning about shared-memory and event-based concurrency
This research started with an algebra for reasoning about rely/guarantee
concurrency for a shared memory model. The approach taken led to a more
abstract algebra of atomic steps, in which atomic steps synchronise (rather
than interleave) when composed in parallel. The algebra of rely/guarantee
concurrency then becomes an instantiation of the more abstract algebra. Many of
the core properties needed for rely/guarantee reasoning can be shown to hold in
the abstract algebra where their proofs are simpler and hence allow a higher
degree of automation. The algebra has been encoded in Isabelle/HOL to provide a
basis for tool support for program verification.
In rely/guarantee concurrency, programs are specified to guarantee certain
behaviours until assumptions about the behaviour of their environment are
violated. When assumptions are violated, program behaviour is unconstrained
(aborting), and guarantees need no longer hold. To support these guarantees a
second synchronous operator, weak conjunction, was introduced: both processes
in a weak conjunction must agree to take each atomic step, unless one aborts in
which case the whole aborts. In developing the laws for parallel and weak
conjunction we found many properties were shared by the operators and that the
proofs of many laws were essentially the same. This insight led to the idea of
generalising synchronisation to an abstract operator with only the axioms that
are shared by the parallel and weak conjunction operator, so that those two
operators can be viewed as instantiations of the abstract synchronisation
operator. The main differences between parallel and weak conjunction are how
they combine individual atomic steps; that is left open in the axioms for the
abstract operator.Comment: Extended version of a Formal Methods 2016 paper, "An algebra of
synchronous atomic steps
Operational Semantics of Process Monitors
CSPe is a specification language for runtime monitors that can directly
express concurrency in a bottom-up manner that composes the system from
simpler, interacting components. It includes constructs to explicitly flag
failures to the monitor, which unlike deadlocks and livelocks in conventional
process algebras, propagate globally and aborts the whole system's execution.
Although CSPe has a trace semantics along with an implementation demonstrating
acceptable performance, it lacks an operational semantics. An operational
semantics is not only more accessible than trace semantics but also
indispensable for ensuring the correctness of the implementation. Furthermore,
a process algebra like CSPe admits multiple denotational semantics appropriate
for different purposes, and an operational semantics is the basis for
justifying such semantics' integrity and relevance. In this paper, we develop
an SOS-style operational semantics for CSPe, which properly accounts for
explicit failures and will serve as a basis for further study of its
properties, its optimization, and its use in runtime verification
The ALPS project: open source software for strongly correlated systems
We present the ALPS (Algorithms and Libraries for Physics Simulations)
project, an international open source software project to develop libraries and
application programs for the simulation of strongly correlated quantum lattice
models such as quantum magnets, lattice bosons, and strongly correlated fermion
systems. Development is centered on common XML and binary data formats, on
libraries to simplify and speed up code development, and on full-featured
simulation programs. The programs enable non-experts to start carrying out
numerical simulations by providing basic implementations of the important
algorithms for quantum lattice models: classical and quantum Monte Carlo (QMC)
using non-local updates, extended ensemble simulations, exact and full
diagonalization (ED), as well as the density matrix renormalization group
(DMRG). The software is available from our web server at
http://alps.comp-phys.org.Comment: For full software and introductory turorials see
http://alps.comp-phys.or
- …