234 research outputs found
Region Type Checking for Core-Java
Region-based memory management offers several important advantages over garbage-collected heap, including real-time performance, better data locality and efficient use of limited memory. The concept of regions was first introduced for a call-by-value functional language by Tofte and Talpin, and has since been advocated for imperative and object-oriented languages. Scope memory, a lexical variant of regions, is now a core feature in a recent proposal on Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ). In this paper, we propose a region-based memory management system for a core subset of Java. Our region type analysis can completely prevent dangling references and thus is ready to cater for the no-dangling requirement in RTSJ. Our system also supports modular compilation, which is an important feature for Java, but was missing in recent related work.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA
The Three Pillars of Machine Programming
In this position paper, we describe our vision of the future of machine programming through a categorical examination of three pillars of research. Those pillars are:(i) intention,(ii) invention, and (iii) adaptation. Intention emphasizes advancements in the human-to-computer and computer-to-machine-learning interfaces. Invention emphasizes the creation or refinement of algorithms or core hardware and software building blocks through machine learning (ML). Adaptation emphasizes advances in the use of ML-based constructs to autonomously evolve software
Dynamic Assignment of Scoped Memory Regions in the Translation of Java to Real-Time Java
Advances in middleware, operating systems, and popular, general-purpose languages have brought the ideal of reasonably-bound execution time closer to developers who need such assurances for real-time and embedded systems applications. Extensions to the Java libraries and virtual machine have been proposed in a real-time Java standard, which provides for speciļ¬cation of release times, execution costs, and deadlines for a restricted class of threads. To use such features, the programmer is required to use unwieldy code constructs to create region-like areas of storage, associate them with execution scopes, and allocate objects from them. Further, the developer must ensure that they do not violate strict inter-region reference rules. Unfortunately, it is difļ¬cult to determine manually how to map object instantiations to execution scopes. Moreover, if ordinary Java code is modiļ¬ed to effect instantiations in scopes, the resulting code is difļ¬cult to read, maintain, and reuse. We present a dynamic approach to determining proper placement of objects within scope-bounded regions, and we employ a procedure that utilizes aspect-oriented programming to instrument the original program, realizing the programās scoped memory concerns in a modular fashion. Using this approach, Java programs can be converted into region-aware Java programs automatically
Latte: Lightweight Aliasing Tracking for Java
Many existing systems track aliasing and uniqueness, each with their own
trade-off between expressiveness and developer effort. We propose Latte, a new
approach that aims to minimize both the amount of annotations and the
complexity of invariants necessary for reasoning about aliasing in an
object-oriented language with mutation. Our approach only requires annotations
for parameters and fields, while annotations for local variables are inferred.
Furthermore, it relaxes uniqueness to allow aliasing among local variables, as
long as this aliasing can be precisely determined. This enables support for
destructive reads without changes to the language or its run-time semantics.
Despite this simplicity, we show how this design can still be used for tracking
uniqueness and aliasing in a local sequential setting, with practical
applications, such as modeling a stack
Achievements, open problems and challenges for search based software testing
Search Based Software Testing (SBST) formulates testing as an optimisation problem, which can be attacked using computational search techniques from the field of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE). We present an analysis of the SBST research agenda, focusing on the open problems and challenges of testing non-functional properties, in particular a topic we call 'Search Based Energy Testing' (SBET), Multi-objective SBST and SBST for Test Strategy Identification. We conclude with a vision of FIFIVERIFY tools, which would automatically find faults, fix them and verify the fixes. We explain why we think such FIFIVERIFY tools constitute an exciting challenge for the SBSE community that already could be within its reach
Repairing and mechanising the JavaScript relaxed memory model
Ā© 2020 ACM. Modern JavaScript includes the SharedArrayBuffer feature, which provides access to true shared memory concurrency. SharedArrayBuffers are simple linear buffers of bytes, and the JavaScript specification defines an axiomatic relaxed memory model to describe their behaviour. While this model is heavily based on the C/C++11 model, it diverges in some key areas. JavaScript chooses to give a well-defined semantics to data-races, unlike the "undefined behaviour" of C/C++11. Moreover, the JavaScript model is mixed-size. This means that its accesses are not to discrete locations, but to (possibly overlapping) ranges of bytes. We show that the model, in violation of the design intention, does not support a compilation scheme to ARMv8 which is used in practice. We propose a correction, which also incorporates a previously proposed fix for a failure of the model to provide Sequential Consistency of Data-Race-Free programs (SC-DRF), an important correctness condition. We use model checking, in Alloy, to generate small counter-examples for these deficiencies, and investigate our correction. To accomplish this, we also develop a mixed-size extension to the existing ARMv8 axiomatic model. Guided by our Alloy experimentation, we mechanise (in Coq) the JavaScript model (corrected and uncorrected), our ARMv8 model, and, for the corrected JavaScript model, a "model-internal" SC-DRF proof and a compilation scheme correctness proof to ARMv8. In addition, we investigate a non-mixed-size subset of the corrected JavaScript model, and give proofs of compilation correctness for this subset to x86-TSO, Power, RISC-V, ARMv7, and (again) ARMv8, via the Intermediate Memory Model (IMM). As a result of our work, the JavaScript standards body (ECMA TC39) will include fixes for both issues in an upcoming edition of the specification
Effective memory management for mobile environments
Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices exhibit vastly different constraints compared to regular or classic computing environments like desktops, laptops, or servers. Mobile devices run dozens of so-called āappsā hosted by independent virtual machines (VM). All these VMs run concurrently and each VM deploys purely local heuristics to organize resources like memory, performance, and power. Such a design causes conflicts across all layers of the software stack, calling for the evaluation of VMs and the optimization techniques specific for mobile frameworks.
In this dissertation, we study the design of managed runtime systems for mobile platforms. More specifically, we deepen the understanding of interactions between garbage collection (GC) and system layers. We develop tools to monitor the memory behavior of Android-based apps and to characterize GC performance, leading to the development of new techniques for memory management that address energy constraints, time performance, and responsiveness.
We implement a GC-aware frequency scaling governor for Android devices. We also explore the tradeoffs of power and performance in vivo for a range of realistic GC variants, with established benchmarks and real applications running on Android virtual machines. We control for variation due to dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), Just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and across established dimensions of heap memory size and concurrency. Finally, we provision GC as a global service that collects statistics from all running VMs and then makes an informed decision that optimizes across all them (and not just locally), and across all layers of the stack.
Our evaluation illustrates the power of such a central coordination service and garbage collection mechanism in improving memory utilization, throughput, and adaptability to user activities. In fact, our techniques aim at a sweet spot, where total on-chip energy is reduced (20ā30%) with minimal impact on throughput and responsiveness (5ā10%). The simplicity and efficacy of our approach reaches well beyond the usual optimization techniques
Project-Team RMoD 2016 Activity Report
Activity Report 2016 Project-Team RMOD Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolutio
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