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Busy periods of finite buffer tandem service systems have not been addressed in the available literature. This paper defines the stage-I and stage-II busy periods of a two-stage tandem service system Mx/M/c→/PH(r)/1/K, analytically obtains their distributions, and presents efficient algorithms for the distributions with uniform error in time. The detailed analysis and algorithmic implementation for the two-stage tandem service system are completed, and the theoretical basis for its potential practical applications is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly when one or more faults occur. Nowadays, as software systems become more and more complex, their hardware execution platforms also become more heterogenous with larger scale. Software systems may fail due to some faults such as node breakdown, communication failure, or data processing failure. In this paper, we propose a ring-based resilience mechanism, which implements fault detection and recovery. (1) To solve the problem that the central server may have high burden of network traffic, we design a ring-based heartbeat algorithm for crash fault detection. (2) We also design a light-weight recovery mechanism to recover from crash faults as compared with the current system-specific mechanisms. To evaluate our mechanism, we use a 3D-online game system as a case study. By injecting faults, we test the effectiveness and overhead of the proposed mechanism. Compared with other mechanisms, the experimental results show that our mechanism can support resilience very well and is better at dealing with the crash fault caused by high cluster workload with acceptable overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OpenMP has been focused in performance applied to numerical applications, but when we try to move this focus to other kind of applications, like Web servers, we detect one important lack. In these applications, performance is important, but reliability is even more important, and OpenMP does not have any recovery mechanism. In this paper we present a novel proposal to address this lack. In order to add error handling to OpenMP we propose some extensions to the current OpenMP specification. A directive and a clause are proposed, defining a scope for the error handling (where the error can occur) and specifying a behaviour for handling the specific errors. Some examples of use are presented, and we present also an evaluation showing the impact of this proposal in OpenMP applications. We show that this impact is low enough to consider the proposal worthwhile for OpenMP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving cache performance requires understanding cache behavior. However, measuring cache performance for one or two data input sets provides little insight into how cache behavior varies across all data input sets and all cache configurations. This paper uses locality analysis to generate a parameterized model of program cache behavior. Given a cache size and associativity, this model predicts the miss rate for arbitrary data input set sizes. This model also identifies critical data input sizes where cache behavior exhibits marked changes. Experiments show this technique is within 2 percent of the hit rate for set associative caches on a set of floating-point and integer programs using array and pointer-based data structures. Building on the new model, this paper presents an interactive visualization tool that uses a three-dimensional plot to show miss rate changes across program data sizes and cache sizes and its use in evaluating compiler transformations. Other uses of this visualization tool include assisting machine and benchmark-set design. The tool can be accessed on the Web at http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In multilabel learning, each instance in the training set is associated with a set of labels and the task is to output a label set whose size is unknown a priori for each unseen instance. In this paper, this problem is addressed in the way that a neural network algorithm named BP-MLL, i.e., Backpropagation for Multilabel Learning, is proposed. It is derived from the popular Backpropagation algorithm through employing a novel error function capturing the characteristics of multilabel learning, i.e., the labels belonging to an instance should be ranked higher than those not belonging to that instance. Applications to two real-world multilabel learning problems, i.e., functional genomics and text categorization, show that the performance of BP-MLL is superior to that of some well-established multilabel learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To boost the performance of massive data processing, solid-state drives (SSDs) have been used as a kind of cache in the Hadoop system. However, most of existing SSD cache management algorithms are ignorant of the characteristics of upper-level applications. In this paper, we propose a novel SSD cache management algorithm called DSA, which can exploit the application-level data similarity to improve the SSD cache performance in Hadoop. Our algorithm takes both temporal similarity and user similarity in querying behaviors into account. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed DSA algorithm in a small-scale Hadoop cluster. Our experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve much better performance than other well-known algorithms (e.g., LRU, FIFO). We also clearly point out the underlying tradeoff between cache performance and SSD deployment cost, and identify a number of key factors that affect SSD cache performance. Our findings can provide useful guidelines on how to effectively integrate SSDs into Hadoop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Data processing algorithms are important parts of modern measurement systems. These algorithms are often delivered to the user as complex program and their numerical structure is not known. Therefore also influence of algorithm on processed data accuracy is not known. One of the methods to evaluate uncertainty propagation through algorithm is based on matrix form of algorithm. Coefficient matrix of algorithm represents its numerical operations and it is a basis to algorithm accuracy evaluation. The paper presents a method how to identify this coefficient matrix when algebraic form of the algorithm is known or is difficult to use. Identified matrix form of algorithm is then used to estimate uncertainty propagation through exemplary algorithms. Results are compared with experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the one-dimensional (1-D) fast 8 x 8 inverse integer transform algorithm for Windows Media Video 9 (WMV-9/VC-1) is proposed. Based on the symmetric property of the integer transform matrix and the matrix operations, which denote the row/column permutations and the matrix decompositions, the efficient fast 1-D 8 x 8 inverse integer transform is developed. Therefore, the computational complexities of the proposed fast inverse transform are smaller than those of the direct method and the previous fast method. With low complexity, the proposed fast algorithm is suitable to accelerate the video coding computations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text categorization is the task of assigning predefined categories to natural language text. With the widely used "bag-of-word" representation, previous researches usually assign a word with values that express whether this word appears in the document concerned or how frequently this word appears. Although these values are useful for text categorization, they have not fully expressed the abundant information contained in the document. This paper explores the effect of other types of values, which express the distribution of a word in the document. These novel values assigned to a word are called distributional features, which include the compactness of the appearances of the word and the, position of the first appearance of the word. The proposed distributional features are exploited by a tfidf style equation, and different features are combined using ensemble learning techniques. Experiments show that the distributional features are useful for text categorization. In contrast to using the traditional term frequency values solely, including the distributional features requires only a little additional cost, while the categorization performance can be significantly improved. Further analysis shows that the distributional features are especially useful when documents are long and the writing style is casual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent Maximum Weighted Likelihood (MWL) [18], [19] has provided a general learning paradigm for density-mixture model selection and learning, in which weight design, however, is a key issue. This paper will therefore explore such a design, and through which a heuristic extended Expectation-Maximization (X-EM) algorithm is presented accordingly. Unlike the EM algorithm [1], the X-EM algorithm is able to perform model selection by fading the redundant components out from a density mixture, meanwhile estimating the model parameters appropriately. The numerical simulations demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses axiomatic and functional models of the semantics of structured programming. The models are presented together with their respective methodologies (or proving program correctness and for denying correct programs. Examples using these methodologies are given. Finally, the models are compared and contrasted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real-time collaborative environments, address space transformation strategy can be used to achieve consistency maintenance of shared documents. However, as for the execution of compound operations, they are firstly decomposed into primitive operations, the relationships between the referencing objects and referenced objects are lost during the decomposition process. Besides, the Undo operations in this environment are targeted at compound operations, but not decomposed basic ones. However, the traditional algorithms take primitive operation as the manipulation unit, thus leading to semantic inconsistencies of compound Undo operations. This paper appends two history buffers to maintain the relationships between the original operations and the decomposed ones and introduces “Retrace-Undo-VT-Redo-Retrace” strategy to realize the consistency maintenance of compound operations. Also, this paper introduces the version-decomposition strategy, describes the main algorithms of the compound Undo operations and analyses the validity of the strategy. Case analysis is given to show the effectiveness of the strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a number of terrain generation techniques have been proposed during the last few years, all of them have some key constraints. Modelling techniques depend highly upon designer's skills, time, and effort to obtain acceptable results, and cannot be used to automatically generate terrains. The simpler methods allow only a narrow variety of terrain types and offer little control on the outcome terrain. The Genetic Terrain Programming technique, based on evolutionary design with Genetic Programming, allows designers to evolve terrains according to their aesthetic feelings or desired features. This technique evolves Terrain Programmes (TPs) that are capable of generating a family of terrains—different terrains that consistently present the same morphological characteristics. This paper presents a study about the persistence of morphological characteristics of terrains generated with different resolutions by a given TP. Results show that it is possible to use low resolutions during the evolutionary phase without compromising the outcome, and that terrain macrofeatures are scale invariant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OpenMP [OpenMP Architecture Review Board. OpenMP application program interface, version 2.5] is an important API for shared memory programming, combining shared memory’s potential for performance with a simple programming interface. Unfortunately, OpenMP lacks a critical tool for demonstrating whether programs are correct: a formal memory model. Instead, the current official definition of the OpenMP memory model (the OpenMP 2.5 specification [OpenMP Architecture Review Board. OpenMP application program interface, version 2.5]) is in terms of informal prose. As a result, it is impossible to verify OpenMP applications formally since the prose does not provide a formal consistency model that precisely describes how reads and writes on different threads interact. We expand on our previous work that focused on the formal verification of OpenMP programs through a formal memory model [Greg Bronevetsky and Bronis de Supinski. Formal specification of the memory model. In International Workshop on OpenMP (IWOMP), (2006)]. As in that work, our formalization, which is derived from the existing prose model [OpenMP Architecture Review Board. OpenMP application program interface, version 2.5], provides a two-step process to verify whether an observed OpenMP execution is conformant. This paper extends the model to cover the entire specification. In addition to this formalization, our contributions include a discussion of ambiguities in the current prose-based memory model description. Although our formal model may not capture the current informal memory model perfectly, in part due to these ambiguities, our model reflects our understanding of the informal model’s intent. We conclude with several examples that may indicate areas of the OpenMP memory model that need further refinement, however it is specified. Our goal is to motivate the OpenMP community to adopt those refinements eventually, ideally through a formal model, in later OpenMP specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nested OpenMP parallelism allows an application to spawn teams of nested threads. This hierarchical nature of thread creation and usage poses problems for performance measurement tools that must determine thread context to properly maintain per-thread performance data. In this paper we describe the problem and a novel solution for identifying threads uniquely. Our approach has been implemented in the TAU performance system and has been successfully used in profiling and tracing OpenMP applications with nested parallelism. We also describe how extensions to the OpenMP standard can help tool developers uniquely identify threads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of decomposed software pipelining is to decouple the software pipelining problem into a cyclic scheduling problem without resource constraints and an acyclic scheduling problem with resource constraints. In terms of loop transformation and code motion, the technique can be formulated as a combination of loop shifting and loop compaction. Loop shifting amounts to moving statements between iterations thereby changing some loop independent dependences into loop carried dependences and vice versa. Then, loop compaction schedules the body of the loop considering only loop independent dependences, but taking into account the details of the target architecture. In this paper, we show how loop shifting can be optimized so as to minimize both the length of the critical path and the number of dependences for loop compaction. The first problem is well-known and can be solved by an algorithm due to Leiserson and Saxe. We show that the second optimization (and the combination with the first one) is also polynomially solvable with a fast graph algorithm, variant of minimum-cost flow algorithms. Finally, we analyze the improvements obtained on loop compaction by experiments on random graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an implementation of a vectorizing C compiler for Intel's MMX (Multimedia Extension). This compiler would identify data parallel sections of the code using scalar and array dependence analysis. To enhance the scope for application of the subword semantics, our compiler performs several code transformations. These include strip mining, scalar expansion, grouping and reduction, and distribution. Thereafter inline assembly instructions corresponding to the data parallel sections are generated. We have used the Stanford University Intermediate Format (SUIF), a public domain compiler tool, for our implementation. We evaluated the performance of the code generated by our compiler for a number of benchmarks. Initial performance results reveal that our compiler generated code produces a reasonable performance improvement (speedup of 2 to 6.5) over the the code generated without the vectorizing transformations/inline assembly. In certain cases, the performance of the compiler generated code is within 85% of the hand-tuned code for MMX architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the design and implementation of an intelligent tutoring system for the Dijkstra-Gries programming methodology as defined by Cries in "The Science of Programming"[12]. The first part of the paper identifies the requirements of intelligent tutoring systems in general and those of the methodology in particular. It shows the suitability of the Smalltalk environment for developing expandable intelligent systems and the compatibility of Smalltalk's object-oriented paradigm with the Gries methodology's goal/plan approach to programming. We then describe how these requirements are met: an overview of the system's support of the methodology and the modules that enable the system to respond intelligently. As an example, a reusable tutorial part is presented, first from a student's perspective, then from an author's perspective. Finally the results of an evaluation of the system drawn from actual student experience are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explain why pre-run-time scheduling is essential if one wishes to guarantee that timing constraints will be satisfied in a large complex hard-real-time system. We examine some of the major concerns in pre-run-time scheduling and consider what formulations of mathematical scheduling problems can be used to address those concerns. This paper provides a guide to the available algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagrams play a central role in software engineering. They are used for specifying design elements such as requirements, concurrent systems, database models and interactive systems. Families of diagrams form visual languages, and creating such diagrams constitutes visual programming. The Visual Programmer's WorkBench (VPW) addresses the rapid synthesis of programming environments for the specification, analysis, and execution of visual programs. A language-based environment for a specific visual language is generated in VPW from a specification of the syntactic structure, the abstract structure, the static semantics and the dynamic semantics of the language. VPW is built around a model of distributed processing based on shared distributed memory. This framework is used both in defining the architecture of the environment and for the execution model of visual languages. The Visual Programmer's WorkBench has been used to experiment with visual programming environments for several visual languages. This paper describes the design of the Visual Programmer's WorkBench and our experience using it to generate a distributed programming environment for a concurrent visual language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains an exposition of the method of programming with verification conditions. Although this method has much in common with the one discussed by Dijkstra in A Discipline of Programming, it is shown to have the advantage in simplicity and flexibility. The simplicity is the result of the method's being directly based on Floyd's inductive assertions. The method is flexible because of the way in which the program is constructed in two stages. In the first stage, a set of verification conditions is collected which corresponds to a program in "flowgraph" form. In this stage sequencing control is of no concern to the programmer. Control is introduced in the second stage, which consists of automatable applications of translation and optimization rules, resulting in conventional code. Although our method has no use for the sequencing primitives of "structured programming," it is highly secure and systematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method for formal description of programming principles is presented in this paper. Programming principles, such as sequential search can be defined and proven even in the absence of an application. We represent a principle as a program scheme which has partially interpreted functions in it. The functions must obey certain input constraints. Use of these ideas in program proving is illustrated with examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors present Swarm, a parallel architecture that exploits ordered parallelism, which is abundant but hard to mine with current software and hardware techniques. Swarm programs consist of short tasks, as small as tens of instructions each, with programmer-specified order constraints. Swarm executes tasks speculatively and out of order and efficiently speculates thousands of tasks ahead of the earliest active task to uncover enough parallelism. Several techniques allow Swarm to scale to large core counts and speculation windows. The authors evaluate Swarm on graph analytics, simulation, and database benchmarks. At 64 cores, Swarm outperforms sequential implementations of these algorithms by 43 to 117 times and state-of-the-art software-only parallel algorithms by 3 to 18 times. Besides achieving near-linear scalability, Swarm programs are almost as simple as their sequential counterparts, because they do not use explicit synchronization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Lock-freedom is a property of concurrent programs which states that, from any state of the program, eventually some process will complete its operation. Lock-freedom is a weaker property than the usual expectation that eventually all processes will complete their operations. By weakening their completion guarantees, lock-free programs increase the potential for parallelism, and hence make more efficient use of multiprocessor architectures than lock-based algorithms. However, lock-free algorithms, and reasoning about them, are considerably more complex. In this paper we present a technique for proving that a program is lock-free. The technique is designed to be as general as possible and is guided by heuristics that simplify the proofs. We demonstrate our theory by proving lock-freedom of two non-trivial examples from the literature. The proofs have been machine-checked by the PVS theorem prover, and we have developed proof strategies to minimise user interaction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Statecharts are a visual technique for modelling reactive behaviour. Over the years, a plethora of statechart semantics have been proposed. The three most widely used are the fixpoint, Statemate, and UML semantics. These three semantics differ considerably from each other. In general, they interpret the same statechart differently, which impedes the communication of statechart designs among both designers and tools. In this paper, we identify a set of constraints on statecharts that ensure that the fixpoint, Statemate and UML semantics coincide, if observations are restricted to linear, stuttering-closed, separable properties. Moreover, we show that for a subset of these constraints, a slight variation of the Statemate semantics coincides for linear stuttering-closed properties with the UML semantics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Clustering is a division of data into groups of similar objects. Each group, called a cluster; consists of objects that are similar between themselves and dissimilar compared to objects of other groups. This paper is intended to study and compare different data clustering algorithms. The algorithms under investigation are: k-means algorithm, hierarchical clustering algorithm, self-organizing maps algorithm, and expectation maximization clustering algorithm. All these algorithms are compared according to the following factors: size of dataset, number of clusters, type of dataset and type of software used. Some conclusions that are extracted belong to the performance, quality, and accuracy of the clustering algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: To study the properties of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Java programs, our research group has produced a series of JVM models written in a functional subset of Common Lisp. In this paper, we present our most complete JVM model from this series, namely, M6, which is derived from a careful study of the J2ME KVM [Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and the K Virtual Machine, http://java.sun.com/products/cldc/] implementation. On the one hand, our JVM model is a conventional machine emulator. M6 implements dynamic class loading, class initialization and synchronization via monitors. It executes most J2ME CLDC Java programs that do not use any I/O or floating point operations. Engineers may consider M6 an implementation of the JVM. The June 2003 version is implemented with around 10K lines of Lisp in 28 modules. On the other hand, M6 is novel because it allows for analytical reasoning in addition to conventional testing. M6 is written in an applicative (side-effect free) subset of Common Lisp, for which we have given precise meaning in terms of axioms and inference rules. Properties of M6 and its bytecoded programs can be expressed as formulas and proved as theorems. Proofs are constructed interactively with a mechanical theorem prover. Its concreteness, completeness, executability and mechanized reasoning support make our model unique among JVM models. We argue that our approach of building an executable model of the system with an axiomatically described functional language can bring benefits from both the testing and the formal reasoning worlds. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A state constraint is a new programming construct designed to restrict the domain of definition of a program. It can be used to decompose a program pathwise, i.e., to divide the program into subprograms along the control How, as opposed to divide the program across the control flow when the program is decomposed into functions and procedures. As a result one can now construct and manipulate a program consisting of one or more execution paths of another program. This paper describes the idea involved, examines the properties of state constraints, establishes a formal basis for pathwise decomposition, and discusses their utilities in program simplification, testing, and verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distributed system is an interconnected network of computing elements or nodes, each of which has its own storage. A distributed program is a collection of processes which execute asynchronously, possibly in different nodes of a distributed system, and they communicate with each other in order to realize a common goal. In such an environment, a group of processes may sometimes get involved in a communication deadlock. This is a situation in which each member process of the group is waiting for some member to communicate with it, but no member is attempting communication with it. In this paper, we present an algorithm for detecting such communication deadlocks. The algorithm is distributed, i.e., processes detect deadlocks during the course of their communication, without the aid of a central controller. The detection scheme does not presume any a priori structure among processes, and detection is made "on the fly" without freezing normal activities. The scheme does not require any storage whose size is determined by the size of the network, and hence is suitable also for an environment where processes are created dynamically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]