15,444 research outputs found
Dynamic and Transparent Analysis of Commodity Production Systems
We propose a framework that provides a programming interface to perform
complex dynamic system-level analyses of deployed production systems. By
leveraging hardware support for virtualization available nowadays on all
commodity machines, our framework is completely transparent to the system under
analysis and it guarantees isolation of the analysis tools running on its top.
Thus, the internals of the kernel of the running system needs not to be
modified and the whole platform runs unaware of the framework. Moreover, errors
in the analysis tools do not affect the running system and the framework. This
is accomplished by installing a minimalistic virtual machine monitor and
migrating the system, as it runs, into a virtual machine. In order to
demonstrate the potentials of our framework we developed an interactive kernel
debugger, nicknamed HyperDbg. HyperDbg can be used to debug any critical kernel
component, and even to single step the execution of exception and interrupt
handlers.Comment: 10 pages, To appear in the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on
Automated Software Engineering, Antwerp, Belgium, 20-24 September 201
CLPGUI: a generic graphical user interface for constraint logic programming over finite domains
CLPGUI is a graphical user interface for visualizing and interacting with
constraint logic programs over finite domains. In CLPGUI, the user can control
the execution of a CLP program through several views of constraints, of finite
domain variables and of the search tree. CLPGUI is intended to be used both for
teaching purposes, and for debugging and improving complex programs of
realworld scale. It is based on a client-server architecture for connecting the
CLP process to a Java-based GUI process. Communication by message passing
provides an open architecture which facilitates the reuse of graphical
components and the porting to different constraint programming systems.
Arbitrary constraints and goals can be posted incrementally from the GUI. We
propose several dynamic 2D and 3D visualizations of the search tree and of the
evolution of finite domain variables. We argue that the 3D representation of
search trees proposed in this paper provides the most appropriate visualization
of large search trees. We describe the current implementation of the
annotations and of the interactive execution model in GNU-Prolog, and report
some evaluation results.Comment: 16 pages; Alexandre Tessier, editor; WLPE 2002,
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.SE/020705
Inviwo -- A Visualization System with Usage Abstraction Levels
The complexity of today's visualization applications demands specific
visualization systems tailored for the development of these applications.
Frequently, such systems utilize levels of abstraction to improve the
application development process, for instance by providing a data flow network
editor. Unfortunately, these abstractions result in several issues, which need
to be circumvented through an abstraction-centered system design. Often, a high
level of abstraction hides low level details, which makes it difficult to
directly access the underlying computing platform, which would be important to
achieve an optimal performance. Therefore, we propose a layer structure
developed for modern and sustainable visualization systems allowing developers
to interact with all contained abstraction levels. We refer to this interaction
capabilities as usage abstraction levels, since we target application
developers with various levels of experience. We formulate the requirements for
such a system, derive the desired architecture, and present how the concepts
have been exemplary realized within the Inviwo visualization system.
Furthermore, we address several specific challenges that arise during the
realization of such a layered architecture, such as communication between
different computing platforms, performance centered encapsulation, as well as
layer-independent development by supporting cross layer documentation and
debugging capabilities
Teaching programming at a distance: the Internet software visualization laboratory
This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and through surface mail.
Through our empirical studies and experience teaching the course we have identified four current problems: (i) students' difficulty mapping between the graphical representations used in the course and the programs to which they relate, (ii) the lack of a conversational context for tutor help provided over the telephone, (iii) helping students who due to their other commitments tend to study at 'unsociable' hours, and (iv) providing software for the constantly changing and expanding range of platforms and operating systems used by students.
We hope to alleviate these problems through our Internet Software Visualization Laboratory (ISVL), which supports individual exploration, and both synchronous and asynchronous communication. As a single user, students are aided by the extra mappings provided between the graphical representations used in the course and their computer programs, overcoming the problems of the original notation. ISVL can also be used as a synchronous communication medium whereby one of the users (generally the tutor) can provide an annotated demonstration of a program and its execution, a far richer alternative to technical discussions over the telephone. Finally, ISVL can be used to support asynchronous communication, helping students who work at unsociable hours by allowing the tutor to prepare short educational movies for them to view when convenient. The ISVL environment runs on a conventional web browser and is therefore platform independent, has modest hardware and bandwidth requirements, and is easy to distribute and maintain. Our planned experiments with ISVL will allow us to investigate ways in which new technology can be most appropriately applied in the service of distance education
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Arcadia, a software development environment research project
The research objectives of the Arcadia project are two-fold: discovery and development of environment architecture principles and creation of novel software development tools, particularly powerful analysis tools, which will function within an environment built upon these architectural principles.Work in the architecture area is concerned with providing the framework to support integration while also supporting the often conflicting goal of extensibility. Thus, this area of research is directed toward achieving external integration by providing a consistent, uniform user interface, while still admitting customization and addition of new tools and interface functions. In an effort to also attain internal integration, research is aimed at developing mechanisms for structuring and managing the tools and data objects that populate a software development environment, while facilitating the insertion of new kinds of tools and new classes of objects.The unifying theme of work in the tools area is support for effective analysis at every stage of a software development project. Research is directed toward tools suitable for analyzing pre-implementation descriptions of software, software itself, and towards the production of testing and debugging tools. In many cases, these tools are specifically tailored for applicability to concurrent, distributed, or real-time software systems.The initial focus of Arcadia research is on creating a prototype environment, embodying the architectural principles, which supports Ada1 software development. This prototype environment is itself being developed in Ada.Arcadia is being developed by a consortium of researchers from the University of California at Irvine, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, TRW, Incremental Systems Corporation, and The Aerospace Corporation. This paper delineates the research objectives and describes the approaches being taken, the organization of the research endeavor, and current status of the work
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