9,737 research outputs found
Ada (trademark) projects at NASA. Runtime environment issues and recommendations
Ada practitioners should use this document to discuss and establish common short term requirements for Ada runtime environments. The major current Ada runtime environment issues are identified through the analysis of some of the Ada efforts at NASA and other research centers. The runtime environment characteristics of major compilers are compared while alternate runtime implementations are reviewed. Modifications and extensions to the Ada Language Reference Manual to address some of these runtime issues are proposed. Three classes of projects focusing on the most critical runtime features of Ada are recommended, including a range of immediately feasible full scale Ada development projects. Also, a list of runtime features and procurement issues is proposed for consideration by the vendors, contractors and the government
Threads and Or-Parallelism Unified
One of the main advantages of Logic Programming (LP) is that it provides an
excellent framework for the parallel execution of programs. In this work we
investigate novel techniques to efficiently exploit parallelism from real-world
applications in low cost multi-core architectures. To achieve these goals, we
revive and redesign the YapOr system to exploit or-parallelism based on a
multi-threaded implementation. Our new approach takes full advantage of the
state-of-the-art fast and optimized YAP Prolog engine and shares the underlying
execution environment, scheduler and most of the data structures used to
support YapOr's model. Initial experiments with our new approach consistently
achieve almost linear speedups for most of the applications, proving itself as
a good alternative for exploiting implicit parallelism in the currently
available low cost multi-core architectures.Comment: 17 pages, 21 figures, International Conference on Logic Programming
(ICLP 2010
Emulating and evaluating hybrid memory for managed languages on NUMA hardware
Non-volatile memory (NVM) has the potential to become a mainstream memory technology and challenge DRAM. Researchers evaluating the speed, endurance, and abstractions of hybrid memories with DRAM and NVM typically use simulation, making it easy to evaluate the impact of different hardware technologies and parameters. Simulation is, however, extremely slow, limiting the applications and datasets in the evaluation. Simulation also precludes critical workloads, especially those written in managed languages such as Java and C#. Good methodology embraces a variety of techniques for evaluating new ideas, expanding the experimental scope, and uncovering new insights.
This paper introduces a platform to emulate hybrid memory for managed languages using commodity NUMA servers. Emulation complements simulation but offers richer software experimentation. We use a thread-local socket to emulate DRAM and a remote socket to emulate NVM. We use standard C library routines to allocate heap memory on the DRAM and NVM sockets for use with explicit memory management or garbage collection. We evaluate the emulator using various configurations of write-rationing garbage collectors that improve NVM lifetimes by limiting writes to NVM, using 15 applications and various datasets and workload configurations. We show emulation and simulation confirm each other's trends in terms of writes to NVM for different software configurations, increasing our confidence in predicting future system effects. Emulation brings novel insights, such as the non-linear effects of multi-programmed workloads on NVM writes, and that Java applications write significantly more than their C++ equivalents. We make our software infrastructure publicly available to advance the evaluation of novel memory management schemes on hybrid memories
Lock-free Concurrent Data Structures
Concurrent data structures are the data sharing side of parallel programming.
Data structures give the means to the program to store data, but also provide
operations to the program to access and manipulate these data. These operations
are implemented through algorithms that have to be efficient. In the sequential
setting, data structures are crucially important for the performance of the
respective computation. In the parallel programming setting, their importance
becomes more crucial because of the increased use of data and resource sharing
for utilizing parallelism.
The first and main goal of this chapter is to provide a sufficient background
and intuition to help the interested reader to navigate in the complex research
area of lock-free data structures. The second goal is to offer the programmer
familiarity to the subject that will allow her to use truly concurrent methods.Comment: To appear in "Programming Multi-core and Many-core Computing
Systems", eds. S. Pllana and F. Xhafa, Wiley Series on Parallel and
Distributed Computin
A Methodology for Transforming Java Applications Towards Real-Time Performance
The development of real-time systems has traditionally been based on low-level programming languages, such as C and C++, as these provide a fine-grained control of the applications temporal behavior. However, the usage of such programming languages suffers from increased complexity and high error rates compared to high-level languages such as Java. The Java programming language provides many benefits to software development such as automatic memory management and platform independence. However, Java is unable to provide any real-time guarantees, as the high-level benefits come at the cost of unpredictable temporal behavior.This thesis investigates the temporal characteristics of the Java language and analyses several possibilities for introducing real-time guarantees, including official language extensions and commercial runtime environments. Based on this analysis a new methodology is proposed for Transforming Java Applications towards Real-time Performance (TJARP). This method motivates a clear definition of timing requirements, followed by an analysis of the system through use of the formal modeling languageVDM-RT. Finally, the method provides a set of structured guidelines to facilitate the choice of strategy for obtaining real-time performance using Java. To further support this choice, an analysis is presented of available solutions, supported by a simple case study and a series of benchmarks.Furthermore, this thesis applies the TJARP method to a complex industrialcase study provided by a leading supplier of mission critical systems. Thecase study proves how the TJARP method is able to analyze an existing and complex system, and successfully introduce hard real-time guaranteesin critical sub-components
Evaluating Android OS for embedded real-time systems
Since its official public release, Android has captured
the interest from companies, developers and the general
audience. From that time up to now, this software platform
has been constantly improved either in terms of features or
supported hardware and, at the same time, extended to new
types of devices different from the originally intended mobile
ones. However, there is a feature that has not been explored
yet - its real-time capabilities.
This paper intends to explore this gap and provide a basis
for discussion on the suitability of Android in order to be used
in Open Real-Time environments. By analysing the software
platform, with the main focus on the virtual machine and its
underlying operating system environments, we are able to point
out its current limitations and, therefore, provide a hint on
different perspectives of directions in order to make Android
suitable for these environments.
It is our position that Android may provide a suitable
architecture for real-time embedded systems, but the real-time
community should address its limitations in a joint effort at
all of the platform layers
Virtual Machine Support for Many-Core Architectures: Decoupling Abstract from Concrete Concurrency Models
The upcoming many-core architectures require software developers to exploit
concurrency to utilize available computational power. Today's high-level
language virtual machines (VMs), which are a cornerstone of software
development, do not provide sufficient abstraction for concurrency concepts. We
analyze concrete and abstract concurrency models and identify the challenges
they impose for VMs. To provide sufficient concurrency support in VMs, we
propose to integrate concurrency operations into VM instruction sets.
Since there will always be VMs optimized for special purposes, our goal is to
develop a methodology to design instruction sets with concurrency support.
Therefore, we also propose a list of trade-offs that have to be investigated to
advise the design of such instruction sets.
As a first experiment, we implemented one instruction set extension for
shared memory and one for non-shared memory concurrency. From our experimental
results, we derived a list of requirements for a full-grown experimental
environment for further research
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