Domain-specific Framework Research Articles

ParDSL: a domain-specific language framework for supporting deployment of parallel algorithms

An important challenge in parallel computing is the mapping of parallel algorithms to parallel computing platforms. This requires several activities such as the analysis of the parallel algorithm, the definition of the logical configuration of the platform and the implementation and deployment of the algorithm to the computing platform. However, in current parallel computing approaches very often only conceptual and idiosyncratic models are used which fall short in supporting the communication and analysis of the design decisions. In this article, we present ParDSL, a domain-specific language framework for providing explicit models to support the activities for mapping parallel algorithms to parallel computing platforms. The language framework includes four coherent set of domain-specific languages each of which focuses on an activity of the mapping process. We use the domain-specific languages for modeling the design as well as for generating the required platform-specific models and the code of the selected parallel algorithm. In addition to the languages, a library is defined to support systematic reuse. We discuss the overall architecture of the language framework, the separate DSLs, the corresponding model transformations and the toolset. The framework is illustrated for four different parallel computing algorithms.

Extensibility and Composability of a Multi-Stencil Domain Specific Framework

As the computation power of modern high performance architectures increases, their heterogeneity and complexity also become more important. One of the big challenges of exascale is to reach programming models that give access to high performance computing (HPC) to many scientists and not only to a few HPC specialists. One relevant solution to ease parallel programming for scientists is domain specific language (DSL). However, one problem to avoid with DSLs is to mutualize existing codes and libraries instead of implementing each solution from scratch. For example, this phenomenon occurs for stencil-based numerical simulations, for which a large number of languages has been proposed without code reuse between them. The Multi-Stencil Framework (MSF) presented in this paper combines a new DSL to component-based programming models to enhance code reuse and separation of concerns in the specific case of stencils. MSF can easily choose one parallelization technique or another, one optimization or another, as well as one back-end implementation or another. It is shown that MSF can reach same performances than a non component-based MPI implementation over 16,384 cores. Finally, the performance model of the framework for hybrid parallelization is validated by evaluations.

A framework to accelerate simulation studies of hyperacute stroke systems

Stroke care has been identified as an area where operations research has great potential. In recent years there has been a small but sustained stream of discrete-event simulation case studies in modelling hyperacute stroke systems. The nature of such case studies has led to a fragmented knowledge base and high entry cost to stroke modelling research. Two common issues have faced researchers in stroke care: understanding the logistics and clinical aspects of stroke care and moving from these findings to an appropriately detailed model. We aim to accelerate studies in this area by introducing a conceptual modelling framework that is domain specific for stroke. A domain specific framework trades-off the wide applicability of a general framework against increased efficiency and reuse to support modelling in the problem domain. This compromise is appropriate when the problem domain is complex, of high value to society, and where the saving in future modelling effort is likely to be greater than the effort to create the framework. We detail the requirements of a domain specific conceptual model and then provide domain specific knowledge to support modellers in gaining an understanding of the problem situation, translating this knowledge into selected model outputs, inputs and content in the case of hyperacute stroke. We illustrate the use of the framework with an example based at a large hospital in the United Kingdom.

The Impacts of Domain-General vs. Domain-Specific Diagramming Tools on Writing

Argument diagramming is the process of spatially representing an argument by its component parts and their relationships. A growing body of evidence supports the use of argument diagramming to aid student learning and writing within disciplines including science education. However, most of these studies have focused on basic contrasts between diagramming and no diagramming. The purpose of this study was to learn how different diagramming frameworks affect the benefits afforded by argument diagramming. Three groups of undergraduate students in psychology research methods lab courses were given either no diagramming support, support with a domain-general framework, or support with a domain-specific framework to help them write a research paper introduction. Students given any diagramming support included more relevant citations and considered opposing citations in their papers. Students using the domain-specific framework wrote more about the scientific validity of cited studies than the other two groups, whereas students using the domain-general framework trended towards included more supporting citations.

Towards application-level elasticity on shared cluster: an actor-based approach

In current cluster computing, several distributed frameworks are designed to support elasticity for business services adapting to environment fluctuation. However, most existing works support elasticity mainly at the resource level, leaving application level elasticity support problem to domain-specific frameworks and applications. This paper proposes an actor-based general approach to support application-level elasticity for multiple cluster computing frameworks. The actor model offers scalability and decouples language-level concurrency from the runtime environment. By extending actors, a new middle layer called Unisupervisor is designed to "sit" between the resource management layer and application framework layer. Actors in Unisupervisor can automatically distribute and execute tasks over clusters and dynamically scale in/out. Based on Unisupervisor, high-level profiles (MasterSlave, MapReduce, Streaming, Graph, and Pipeline) for diverse cluster computing requirements can be supported. The entire approach is implemented in a prototype system called UniAS. In the evaluation, both benchmarks and real applications are tested and analyzed in a small scale cluster. Results show that UniAS is expressive and efficiently elastic.

An alternative to domain-general or domain-specific frameworks for theorizing about human evolution and ontogenesis.

This paper maintains that neither a domain-general nor a domain-specific framework is appropriate for furthering our understanding of human evolution and ontogenesis. Rather, as we learn increasingly more about the dynamics of gene-environment interaction and gene expression, theorists should consider a third alternative: a domain-relevant approach, which argues that the infant brain comes equipped with biases that are relevant to, but not initially specific to, processing different kinds of input. The hypothesis developed here is that domain-specific core knowledge/specialized functions do not constitute the start state; rather, functional specialization emerges progressively through neuronal competition over developmental time. Thus, the existence of category-specific deficits in brain-damaged adults cannot be used to bolster claims that category-specific or domain-specific modules underpin early development, because neural specificity in the adult brain is likely to have been the emergent property over time of a developing, self-structuring system in interaction with the environment.

EnContRA: a generic multimedia information retrieval meta-framework

Over the last years, multimedia collections have largely increased as new items are produced every day, such as pictures, audio/music or video. In Multimedia Information Retrieval, this exponential growth leads content-based approaches to gain advantage over other solutions, not only because they take advantage of the intrinsic information contained in the objects, but also because they automatically process and extract it, reducing the burden taken by developers. Several domain specific frameworks have been developed to efficiently retrieve multimedia items empowering the creation of new content-based applications. However, these frameworks are attached to a specific media type, are too complex to be used in a fast prototyping environment, and are not very flexible nor extensible. To solve these issues, we developed EnContRA, an architectural meta-framework that provides generic building blocks for creating domain specific frameworks. Our meta-framework aims at being ready to be used for fast prototyping, with support for rich and multimodal queries, allowing validation of new descriptors, indexing structures or searching algorithms, while creating domain specific frameworks. In this paper we present the meta-framework architecture and describe in detail its modules and features. To validate the meta-framework, we created an image retrieval framework and a demo application that combines image descriptors with textual information, showing how the hierarchical design of EnContRA could be applied to a searching system and to empower the creation of queries.

Cyber security threats in the power sector: Need for a domain specific regulatory framework in India

India is poised to spend over USD 5.8billion as part of the National Smart Grid Mission aimed to alleviate India's ailing power sector as part of its 12th Five year plan (2012–2017). The federal government sponsored Restructured Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Program (R-APDRP) is also focused on building ICT capability in the state electricity boards. Presently however, there is no power sector specific cyber security mandates or policies in India. The Stuxnet, Shamoon and Anonymous incidents have shown that cyber attacks can cause significant damage and pose a risk to National Critical Infrastructure. A lack of security planning as part of designing the Smart grids can potentially leave gaping holes in the country's power sector stability. The paper highlights key cyber security threats across the entire power sector value chain—from generation, to transmission and distribution. It is aimed at building the case for power sector specific cyber security regulations based on the experience of regulators in other critical infrastructure sectors like Banking and Telecom in India and power sector regulations internationally.

Design and initial performance of a high-level unstructured mesh framework on heterogeneous parallel systems

Discuss the main design issues in parallelizing unstructured mesh applications.Present OP2 for developing applications for heterogeneous parallel systems.Analyze the performance gained with OP2 for two industrial-representative benchmarks.Compare runtime, scaling and runtime break-downs of the applications.Present energy consumption of OP2 applications on CPU and GPU clusters. OP2 is a high-level domain specific library framework for the solution of unstructured mesh-based applications. It utilizes source-to-source translation and compilation so that a single application code written using the OP2 API can be transformed into multiple parallel implementations for execution on a range of back-end hardware platforms. In this paper we present the design and performance of OP2's recent developments facilitating code generation and execution on distributed memory heterogeneous systems. OP2 targets the solution of numerical problems based on static unstructured meshes. We discuss the main design issues in parallelizing this class of applications. These include handling data dependencies in accessing indirectly referenced data and design considerations in generating code for execution on a cluster of multi-threaded CPUs and GPUs. Two representative CFD applications, written using the OP2 framework, are utilized to provide a contrasting benchmarking and performance analysis study on a number of heterogeneous systems including a large scale Cray XE6 system and a large GPU cluster. A range of performance metrics are benchmarked including runtime, scalability, achieved compute and bandwidth performance, runtime bottlenecks and systems energy consumption. We demonstrate that an application written once at a high-level using OP2 is easily portable across a wide range of contrasting platforms and is capable of achieving near-optimal performance without the intervention of the domain application programmer.

A Special Issue of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing: Domain-Specific Languages and High-Level Frameworks for High-Performance Computing

A Special Issue of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing: Domain-Specific Languages and High-Level Frameworks for High-Performance Computing

Enabling Effective Programming and Flexible Management of Efficient Body Sensor Network Applications

Wireless body sensor networks (BSNs) possess enormous potential for changing people's daily lives. They can enhance many human-centered application domains such as m-Health, sport and wellness, and human-centered applications that involve physical/virtual social interactions. However, there are still challenging issues that limit their wide diffusion in real life: primarily, the programming complexity of these systems, due to the lack of high-level software abstractions, and the hardware constraints of wearable devices. In contrast with low-level programming and general-purpose middleware, domain-specific frameworks are an emerging programming paradigm designed to fulfill the lack of suitable BSN programming support with proper abstraction layers. This paper analyzes the most important requirements for an effective BSN-specific software framework, enabling efficient signal-processing applications. Specifically, we present signal processing in node environment (SPINE), an open-source programming framework, designed to support rapid and flexible prototyping and management of BSN applications. We describe how SPINE efficiently addresses the identified requirements while providing performance analysis on the most common hardware/software sensor platforms. We also report a few high-impact BSN applications that have been entirely implemented using SPINE to demonstrate practical examples of its effectiveness and flexibility. This development experience has notably led to the definition of a SPINE-based design methodology for BSN applications. Finally, lessons learned from the development of such applications and from feedback received by the SPINE community are discussed.

An Applied Approach to Teach Hospital Information Systems Development Using an Open Source ERP Framework

The objective of the paper is to represent an international pilot project to teach development of free and open source hospital Information systems at the national level using a live pre installed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System. We have developed live image with pre installed free and open source ERP framework -Tryton® (A fork of openERP®) and a free and o pen source health and hospital information system GNU Health® that supports electronic medical records (EMR) which is developed on top of the ERP framework as the second layer. We considered the two layer system as a domain specific application development framework for further agile development of information systems in the healthcare information technology area. Participants were health informatics professionals invited from ministry of health from selected developing countries to participate in the ERP training program at United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNUIIGH) to learn agile development of open source hospital information system based on the ERP concept to adopt the solution in pub lic hospitals and clinics in their respective country. During three days extensive course, participants used a live image of pre installed ERP system and a cloud hosted ERP configured as a distributed clinical information system to support the training and they learned how to configure the solution in a practical and step by step procedure. We have evaluated the course including feedback from the participants through a questionnaire and interview. The result showed a great potential of live open source ERP tools to support the training. It is expected that the results can be used for improvement of development of the other courses in other universities and institutions especially for subjects covering implementation procedures and critical success factors of free and open source ERP framework adoption in hospitals and Health centers with more focus on rural areas. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. S election and peer-review under responsibility of the Faculty of Information Science & Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Ma laysia.

Modelling Collaborative-driven Supply Chains: The ComVantage Method

The paper gives a design view on the first version of the ComVantage modelling method, aimed to support the design and analysis of supply chains that are collaborative, product-centric, process-driven and mapped on IT systems which rely on mobile apps and Linked Data resources. The specification is the result of the conceptualization phase, in the context of a metamodelling specification framework comprising a modelling language, a modelling procedure and a set of mechanisms to be implemented in a modelling tool. The aim is to bridge the business-IT gap and to support modelling activities in the Future Internet Enterprise supply chains on multiple abstraction and detail levels, and also to facilitate their alignment to domain-specific frameworks such as SCOR or VRM.

A flexible building management framework based on wireless sensor and actuator networks

Future buildings will be constantly monitored and managed through intelligent systems that allow having information about the building health, keeping a good comfort level for the building inhabitants and optimizing the energy spent. Despite many WSN programming frameworks have been to date developed and, in some cases, applied to support monitoring of buildings, none of them possesses all the specific features needed to develop WSN-based building applications. In this article a multi-platform domain specific framework based on Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) for enabling efficient and effective management of buildings is presented. The proposed Building Management Framework (BMF) provides powerful abstractions that capture the morphology of buildings to allow for the rapid development and flexible management of pervasive building monitoring applications. The functionalities of the framework are shown in an emblematic case study concerning the SmartEnergyLab that is an effective operating scenario related to the monitoring of the usage of workstations in laboratories and offices. Finally, a performance evaluation of a WSAN running the BMF in terms of network usage and system lifetime is shown.

From Modeling to Implementation of Virtual Sensors in Body Sensor Networks

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) represent an emerging technology which has received much attention recently due to its enormous potential to enable remote, real-time, continuous and non-invasive monitoring of people in health-care, entertainment, fitness, sport, social interaction. Signal processing for BSNs usually comprises of multiple levels of data abstraction, from raw sensor data to data calculated from processing steps such as feature extraction and classification. This paper presents a multi-layer task model based on the concept of Virtual Sensors to improve architecture modularity and design reusability. Virtual Sensors are abstractions of components of BSN systems that include sensor sampling and processing tasks and provide data upon external requests. The Virtual Sensor model implementation relies on SPINE2, an open source domain-specific framework that is designed to support distributed sensing operations and signal processing for wireless sensor networks and enables code reusability, efficiency, and application interoperability. The proposed model is applied in the context of gait analysis through wearable sensors. A gait analysis system is developed according to a SPINE2-based Virtual Sensor architecture and experimentally evaluated. Obtained results confirm that great effectiveness can be achieved in designing and implementing BSN applications through the Virtual Sensor approach while maintaining high efficiency and accuracy.

From basic to applied research: theory and application of the a–b signal detection theory model

The goal of this research was three-fold: (1) address the basic versus applied research debate within the domain-specific signal detection theoretical framework, which scientists and practitioners have used extensively along the full spectrum of this continuum; (2) provide empirical support to validate the adequacy of the model; and (3) show the potential generalisability of the model to different domain-specific areas within applied settings. The results from the basic empirical study suggest that the a–b signal detection theory (SDT) model provides a more accurate theoretical framework for examining the underlying processes involved in signal detection. The findings from the domain-specific studies showed the potential applicability of the a–b SDT model for approaching applied problems. From a theoretical and applied point of view, this research suggests that the traditional SDT contention that the detection and response processes are independent from each other does not hold true for either basic signal detection tasks or domain-specific areas.

A Corpus-based Evaluation of a Domain-specific Text to Knowledge Mapping Prototype

The aim of this paper is to evaluate a Text to Knowledge Mapping (TKM) Prototype. The prototype is domain-specific, the purpose of which is to map instructional text onto a knowledge domain. The context of the knowledge domain is DC electrical circuit. During development, the prototype has been tested with a limited data set from the domain. The prototype reached a stage where it needs to be evaluated with a representative linguistic data set called corpus. A corpus is a collection of text drawn from typical sources which can be used as a test data set to evaluate NLP systems. As there is no available corpus for the domain, we developed and annotated a representative corpus. The evaluation of the prototype considers two of its major components- lexical components and knowledge model. Evaluation on lexical components enriches the lexical resources of the prototype like vocabulary and grammar structures. This leads the prototype to parse a reasonable amount of sentences in the corpus. While dealing with the lexicon was straight forward, the identification and extraction of appropriate semantic relations was much more involved. It was necessary, therefore, to manually develop a conceptual structure for the domain to formulate a domain-specific framework of semantic relations. The framework of semantic relationsthat has resulted from this study consisted of 55 relations, out of which 42 have inverse relations. We also conducted rhetorical analysis on the corpus to prove its representativeness in conveying semantic. Finally, we conducted a topical and discourse analysis on the corpus to analyze the coverage of discourse by the prototype.

On Qualitative Research, Outcome Measures, and the Fostering of Professional Dialogue

Welcome to the IJTMB’s first full year, with a quarterly publication schedule planned for the months of March, June, September, and December. We continue to encourage researchers, educators, and practitioners in the massage, bodywork, and related health science communities to consider this journal as a possible venue for sharing their professional experiences and insights. Included among the several entries in this issue of the IJTMB is an article by Paul Finch that reports on a qualitative investigation regarding motivational changes seen in massage therapy students over the course of their professional education. Although not originally intended as a sequel, it certainly does serve to illustrate the qualitative genre of research addressed in an article that appeared in the journal’s December 2008 issue(1). A second article appearing in this issue speaks to a recently-launched database resource that addresses a dire need among researchers and practitioners in their perennial quest to document, in valid and reliable ways, client-specific outcomes of interventions in the field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Ania Kania, Marja Verhoef, Trish Dryden, and Mark Ware provide an overview of the IN-CAM Outcomes Database, with an emphasis on its underlying domain-specific framework, possible search options, and interactive nature. Part of the rationale behind the Commentaries section of the IJTMB is to afford colleagues an opportunity to respond to entries appearing in the journal and to any other features of this publication. This type of venue for encouraging dialogue among researchers, educators, and practitioners is an intended catalyst for “point–counterpoint” or “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” exchanges potentially beneficial to all concerned. In that context, this issue provides—via the Letters to the Editor—two instances of reader reactions to previously-published editorials with, of course, the opportunity for the originating author to reply. In the first case, Dylan Lott responds to Christopher Moyer’s Research section editorial(2) that appeared in the August 2008 inaugural issue. This lively exchange between Lott and Moyer focuses on the construct of “reductionism” and its role and value in massage therapy research. In the second Letter to the Editor, Pamela Fitch reflects on Moyer’s editorial on “affective massage therapy”(3) published in the December 2008 issue. The result of this dialogue actually attests to perhaps more areas of agreement than may be apparent at first glance. This March 2009 issue expands the News/Announcements section of the journal via additional entries in the calendar of recent and forthcoming conferences, the NCCAM/NIH (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine/National Institutes of Health) news and grant application announcements, and additional announcements and reminders. Of particular note regarding upcoming conferences are the CAHCIM North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine (May 12 – 15, 2009), the Second International Fascia Research Conference (October 27 – 30, 2009), and the Highlighting Massage Therapy in CIM Research Conference (May 13 – 15, 2010). The particularly relevant issues of translational research and tools for assessing manual therapies represent the focal points of two of the several NCCAM/NIH grant application announcements. Also included in the same section of the journal is a congratulatory acknowledgment of the recent launch of the multifaceted Science of Massage website by Ross Turchaninov, MD, and colleagues. This brief editorial has simply highlighted certain features of the March 2009 issue, the details of which we trust you will find engaging and beneficial to your professional efforts. Please know that your continued participation as an interested reader of, and potential contributor to, the IJTMB are both appreciated and encouraged.

Towards A Dynamic Object-Oriented Design Metric Plug-in Framework

Problem Statement: The evolution of software is made difficult by the need to integrate new features with all previously implemented features in software applications. Approach: present study introduced a general-purpose, platform-independent object-oriented design metric plug-in framework called jmetric intended to help building scalable, extendable object-oriented design metric plug-ins. jmetric seeks to address problem by providing the plug-in developer a structured way to separately develop and incrementally integrate independent object-oriented design metrics as plug-ins to a domain specific object-oriented design metrics framework. jmetric was engineered to provide functional building blocks to accelerate the adding, removing and updating of object-oriented design metric plug-ins in tools such as Eclipse, JDeveloper, NetBeans, JBuilder and other Java-based tools. Dependency injection is heavily used in jmetric to accelerate the adding, removing and updating of object-oriented metrics plug-ins. We studied several commonly used integrated development environments and software metrics tools to identify the extendibility of the tools to provide additional object-oriented design metric functionalities as plug-ins. Results: We demonstrate a tool called jmetric tool that had developed as a reference implementation to validate the plug-in capabilities of jmetric. Conclusion: Extending other tools such as Eclipse, JDeveloper and NetBeans to include metric functionalities is possible by wiring plug-ins through dependency injection mechanism in jmetric.

Code Conjurer: Pulling Reusable Software out of Thin Air

For many years, the IT industry has sought to accelerate the software development process by assembling new applications from existing software assets. However, true component-based reuse of the form Douglas Mcllroy envisaged in the 1960s is still the exception rather than the rule, and most of the systematic software reuse practiced today uses heavyweight approaches such as product-line engineering or domain-specific frameworks. By component, we mean any cohesive and compact unit of software functionality with a well-defined interface - from simple programming language classes to more complex artifacts such as Web services and Enterprise JavaBeans.