571,725 research outputs found
Teaching Parallel Programming Using Java
This paper presents an overview of the "Applied Parallel Computing" course
taught to final year Software Engineering undergraduate students in Spring 2014
at NUST, Pakistan. The main objective of the course was to introduce practical
parallel programming tools and techniques for shared and distributed memory
concurrent systems. A unique aspect of the course was that Java was used as the
principle programming language. The course was divided into three sections. The
first section covered parallel programming techniques for shared memory systems
that include multicore and Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) systems. In this
section, Java threads was taught as a viable programming API for such systems.
The second section was dedicated to parallel programming tools meant for
distributed memory systems including clusters and network of computers. We used
MPJ Express-a Java MPI library-for conducting programming assignments and lab
work for this section. The third and the final section covered advanced topics
including the MapReduce programming model using Hadoop and the General Purpose
Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU).Comment: 8 Pages, 6 figures, MPJ Express, MPI Java, Teaching Parallel
Programmin
SkelCL - A Portable Skeleton Library for High-Level GPU Programming
While CUDA and OpenCL made general-purpose programming for Graphics Processing Units (GPU) popular, using these programming approaches remains complex and error-prone because they lack high-level abstractions. The especially challenging systems with multiple GPU are not addressed at all by these low-level programming models. We
propose SkelCL â a library providing so-called algorithmic skeletons that capture recurring patterns of parallel computation and communication, together with an abstract vector data type and constructs for specifying data distribution. We demonstrate that SkelCL greatly simplifies programming GPU systems. We report the competitive performance results of SkelCL using both a simple Mandelbrot set computation and an industrial-strength medical imaging application. Because the library is implemented using OpenCL, it is portable across GPU hardware of different vendors
Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation
Direct manipulation interfaces provide intuitive and interactive features to
a broad range of users, but they often exhibit two limitations: the built-in
features cannot possibly cover all use cases, and the internal representation
of the content is not readily exposed. We believe that if direct manipulation
interfaces were to (a) use general-purpose programs as the representation
format, and (b) expose those programs to the user, then experts could customize
these systems in powerful new ways and non-experts could enjoy some of the
benefits of programmable systems.
In recent work, we presented a prototype SVG editor called Sketch-n-Sketch
that offered a step towards this vision. In that system, the user wrote a
program in a general-purpose lambda-calculus to generate a graphic design and
could then directly manipulate the output to indirectly change design
parameters (i.e. constant literals) in the program in real-time during the
manipulation. Unfortunately, the burden of programming the desired
relationships rested entirely on the user.
In this paper, we design and implement new features for Sketch-n-Sketch that
assist in the programming process itself. Like typical direct manipulation
systems, our extended Sketch-n-Sketch now provides GUI-based tools for drawing
shapes, relating shapes to each other, and grouping shapes together. Unlike
typical systems, however, each tool carries out the user's intention by
transforming their general-purpose program. This novel, semi-automated
programming workflow allows the user to rapidly create high-level, reusable
abstractions in the program while at the same time retaining direct
manipulation capabilities. In future work, our approach may be extended with
more graphic design features or realized for other application domains.Comment: In 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST
2016
A graph rewriting programming language for graph drawing
This paper describes Grrr, a prototype visual graph drawing tool. Previously there were no visual languages for programming graph drawing algorithms despite the inherently visual nature of the process. The languages which gave a diagrammatic view of graphs were not computationally complete and so could not be used to implement complex graph drawing algorithms. Hence current graph drawing tools are all text based. Recent developments in graph rewriting systems have produced computationally complete languages which give a visual view of graphs both whilst programming and during execution. Grrr, based on the Spider system, is a general purpose graph rewriting programming language which has now been extended in order to demonstrate the feasibility of visual graph drawing
Augmenting Agent Platforms to Facilitate Conversation Reasoning
Within Multi Agent Systems, communication by means of Agent Communication
Languages (ACLs) has a key role to play in the co-operation, co-ordination and
knowledge-sharing between agents. Despite this, complex reasoning about agent
messaging, and specifically about conversations between agents, tends not to
have widespread support amongst general-purpose agent programming languages.
ACRE (Agent Communication Reasoning Engine) aims to complement the existing
logical reasoning capabilities of agent programming languages with the
capability of reasoning about complex interaction protocols in order to
facilitate conversations between agents. This paper outlines the aims of the
ACRE project and gives details of the functioning of a prototype implementation
within the Agent Factory multi agent framework
Two Case Studies of Subsystem Design for General-Purpose CSCW Software Architectures
This paper discusses subsystem design guidelines for the software architecture of general-purpose computer supported cooperative work systems, i.e., systems that are designed to be applicable in various application areas requiring explicit collaboration support. In our opinion, guidelines for subsystem level design are rarely given most guidelines currently given apply to the programming language level. We extract guidelines from a case study of the redesign and extension of an advanced commercial workflow management system and place them into the context of existing software engineering research. The guidelines are then validated against the design decisions made in the construction of a widely used web-based groupware system. Our approach is based on the well-known distinction between essential (logical) and physical architectures. We show how essential architecture design can be based on a direct mapping of abstract functional concepts as found in general-purpose systems to modules in the essential architecture. The essential architecture is next mapped to a physical architecture by applying software clustering and replication to achieve the required distribution and performance characteristics
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