34686410
ICSE 97 program update
A terrific 4-parallel track program has emerged from the recent meetings of the ICSE 97 Program Committee and Program Coordinators. As described in earlier columns here in SEN, we have worked hard to develop a variety of new program elements and to construct a meeting of high value to both practitioners and researchers alike. The Advance Program will provide all the details, and will appear both in the next issue of SEN as well as in the mail and on the ICSE 97 website (http://www.ics.uci.edu/icse97/). Until then we thought we'd provide you with a brief update.
6261816
SEAMS 2009: Software engineering for adaptive and self-managing systems
With the rapid growth of web services and the continuous evolution from software-intensive systems to socio-technical ecosystems, the management of modern computing systems with many uncertainties in their environments presents significant challenges and risks for businesses. End-users increasingly demand software systems that are resilient, dependable, fault-tolerant, energy-efficient, or self-healing. One of the most promising approaches to engineering these properties is to equip software systems with feedback control to address the management of inherent system dynamics. The resulting self-adapting and self-managing computing systems are better able to cope with and even accommodate changing contexts and environments, shifting requirements, and computing-on-demand needs. The SEAMS workshop series consolidates the interests in the software engineering community on self-adaptive and self-managing systems. SEAMS provides a forum for researchers to share new results, raise awareness, and promote collaboration. SEAMS 2009 builds on the success of the SEAMS ICSE workshops of 2008 in Leipzig, Germany, 2007 in Minneapolis, USA, and 2006 in Shanghai, China.
11549805
A Metaphor and a Conceptual Architecture for Software Development Environments
A conceptual architecture for software development environments (SDEs) is presented in terms of a new metaphor drawn from business enterprises. A metaphor is employed as the architecture is complex, requiring understanding from several perspectives. The metaphor provides a rich set of familiar concepts that strongly aid in understanding the environment architecture and software production. The metaphor is applicable to individual programming environments, software development environments supporting teams of developers, and to large-scale software production as a whole.
40650035
Knowledge depot
The Jakarta Tool Suite (YrS) is a set of Java-based tools for developing product-line architectures, application generators, and compilers for domain-specific languages. JTS is being used in to develop the next generation of FSATS (Fire Support Automated Test System) that has been developed by the University of Texas Applied Research Laboratories. Unlike its predecessor, the new system, FSATS99, is highly extensible: a product-line of FSATS99 simulators can be assembled from components using YrS. Building C2 simulators in this manner appears to have significantly simplified software development, understanding, maintenance, and evolvability of the system. We will demonstrate our current prototype of FSATS99, along with other capabilities of Yrs. Knowledge Depot supports Project Awareness by capturing documents and communications relevant to a project and, based on the interests people register with the system, redistributes summaries of this information to interested people. This approach allows a user to specify what kinds of information affects his or her work and skim through summaries of this information to determine if any. of the documents or communications have a potential impact upon their work. A user can not only be alerted when there is a change in a component (or other aspect of a project) that he or she depends upon, but can become aware of the fact that the change is being discussed. Project awareness enables the person to prepare for change, and to contribute to the discussion from the perspective of how the change will affect that individual's work. We will demonstrate Little-JIL, a graphical language for specifying the execution of complex processes by teams of agents that consist of both humans and machines. Little-JIL can be thought of as a multi-agent coordination system, or as a process execution system, that offers substantial enhancements over typical workflow systems, especially in its powerful facilities for handling exceptions, its comprehensive treatment of resources, and the uniform way in which it treats humans and automated agents. Little-JIL process specifications are hierarchical decompositions of steps, where steps are guarded by prerequisites and postrequi-sites, whose violates throw exceptions. Steps also incorporate data flow specifications, as well as specifications of resource types that are used as the basis for dynamic scheduling of resources. The demonstration will show the use of the Visual-JIL graphical editor for developing Little-JIL process descriptions, as well as the Juliette environment for supporting execution of Little-JIL processes on a distributed platform of workstations. As part of …
20456594
Software engineering for adaptive and self-managing systems
The objective of this workshop is to consolidate the interest in the software engineering community on autonomic, self-managing, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-configuring, and self-adaptive systems. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers to share new results, raise awareness of new adaptive concerns, and promote collaboration among the community. This workshop will be the first of several to assess progress and identify challenges in this important area.
34199617
An Integrity Check Value Algorithm for Stream Ciphers
A method of calculating an integrity check value (icv) with the use of a stream cipher is presented. The strength of the message integrity this provides is analysed and proven to be dependent on the unpredictability of the stream cipher used. A way of efficiently providing both integrity and encryption with the use of a single stream cipher is also explained. Note that the method of providing message integrity, used with or without encryption, is not subject to a number of attacks that succeed against many conventional integrity schemes. Specifically any legitimate message-icv pair that is copied or removed and subsequently replayed will have an appropriately small small chance of deceiving the receiver. Furthermore, any message-icv pair generated by an attacker and injected into the communication channel will have an appropriately small chance of escaping detection unless the attacker has actually broken the stream cipher. This is the case even if the attacker has any amount of chosen messages and corresponding icvs or performs any number of calculations.
15084848
ASIP Instruction Encoding for Energy and Area Reduction
Application-specific VLIW processors provide an energy and area efficient solution for high-performance embedded applications. One significant design issue is that the long instruction word required to express the instruction parallelism represents a significant cause of energy dissipation. We present an application- tailored instruction encoding solution that modifies the instruction architecture to minimize the instruction word width. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution across a range of benchmarks, resulting in average energy savings of 20% and an average area reduction of 18%, with no performance penalty.
2332594
Automated data cache placement for embedded VLIW ASIPs
Memory bandwidth issues present a formidable bottleneck to accelerating embedded applications, particularly data bandwidth for multiple-issue VLIW processors. Providing an efficient ASIP data cache solution requires that the cache design be tailored to the target application. Multiple caches or caches with multiple ports allow simultaneous parallel access to data, alleviating the bandwidth problem if data is placed effectively. We present a solution that greatly simplifies the creation of targeted caches and automates the process of explicitly allocating individual memory access to caches and banks. The effectiveness of our solution is demonstrated with experimental results.
26580642
Maritxu: Generic Visualization of Highly Parallel Processing
This paper presents Maritxu, a visualisation system developed to aid in the understanding and optimisation of highly parallel computer systems. Maritxu implements a new visualisation paradigm, combining the use of colour, algorithm animation and visual overload. Maritxu adopts an integral approach to Parallel Computing by emphasising the role of the processor (rather than process) in performance optimisation. There are no constraints to the visu-alisation: network size, topology, subnetworks, icon shapes, data mapping, statistics, etc. can all be interactively deened by the user. An example of performance enhancement in a practical transputer-based EMC application is included.
33334239
Transputer communication link
Abstract The transputer communication link is a new standard for system interconnection. It uses the capabilities of VLSI to offer simple, easy-to-use and cheap interconnection for computer systems. This paper describes the transputer's communications link and the considerations which have influenced its design. The advantages of the link are shown in a conventional application. The link adaptor, which interfaces a communications link to the outside world, is introduced. Inmos makes two types of link adaptor. Each is described with example applications.