Structured and flexible gray-box composition: Application to task rescheduling for grid benchmarking

International audienceThe evolution of complex distributed software systems often requires intricate composition operations in order to adapt or add functionalities, react to unanticipated changes to security policies, or do performance improvements, which cannot be modularized in terms of existing services or components. They often need controlled access to selected parts of the implementation, e.g., to manage exceptional situations and crosscutting within services and their compositions. However, existing composition techniques typically support only interface-level (black-box) composition or arbitrary access to the implementation (gray-box or white-box composition). In this paper, we present a more structured approach to the composition of complex software systems that require invasive accesses. Concretely, we provide two contributions, we (i) present a small kernel composition language for structured gray-box composition with explicit control mechanisms and a corresponding aspect-based implementation; (ii) present and compare evolutions using this approach to gray-box composition in the context of two real-world software systems: benchmarking of grid algorithms with NASGrid and transactional replication with JBoss Cache

Structured and flexible gray-box composition using invasive distributed patterns

ISBN = {ISSN: 1646-3692}International audienceThe evolution of complex distributed software systems often requires intricate composition operations in order to adapt or add functionalities, to react to unanticipated changes, or to apply performance improvements that cannot be modularized in terms of existing services and components. These evolutions often need controlled access to selected parts of the implementation, e.g., to manage exceptional situations and crosscutting within services and their compositions. However, existing composition techniques typically support only interface-level (black-box) composition or arbitrary access to the implementation (gray-box or white-box composition). In this paper, we present a structured approach to the composition of complex software systems that require invasive modifications. Concretely, we provide three contributions: (i) we present a small kernel composition language for structured gray-box composition using invasive distributed patterns; (ii) we motivate that gray-box composition approaches should be defined and evaluated in terms of the flexibility and control they provide, a notion of degrees of invasiveness is introduced to help assess this trade-off; (iii) we apply our approach to a new case study of evolution and evaluate it in the context of two previous studies involving two real-world software systems: benchmarking of grid algorithms with NASGrid and transactional replication with JBoss Cache. As a main result, we show that gray-box composition using invasive distributed patterns allows the declarative and modular definition of evolutions of real-world applications that need moderate to high degrees of invasive modifications

Composition non modulaire modulaire

This document survey my different research activities since I have defended my PhD. Thesis. The thread of these work is my fascination for modular programming but also its limits when there is not a single modular decomposition but several decompositions that must coexist. These researches are structured according to several axes: control and data flow, static and dynamic behavior, sequential, concurrent and distributed context.Ce document retrace mes différentes activités de recherche depuis ma thèse. Le fil conducteur de ces travaux est ma fascination pour la programmation modulaire mais aussi ses limites lorsque qu'il n'existe pas une décomposition modulaire d'un problème mais plusieurs décompositions qui doivent coexister. Ces recherches sont déclinées selon plusieurs axes : flot de contrôle et flot de données, comportements statiques et dynamiques, contextes séquentiels, concurrents et distribués

Aspect-based patterns for grid programming

The development of grid algorithms is frequently hampered by limited means to describe topologies and lack of support for the invasive composition of legacy components in order to pass data between them. In this paper we present a solution to overcome these limitations using the notion of invasive patterns for the construction of distributed algorithms, a recent extension of well-known computation and communication patterns. Concretely, we present two contributions. First, based on a study of how patterns are instantiated in NAS Grid, a well-known benchmark used for evaluating performance of computational grids, we show how invasive patterns can be used for the declarative definition of large-scale grid topologies and checkpointing algorithms. Second, we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate how our approach can be used to implement the checkpointing on top of grid applications.