Open Source Ecosystem Research Articles

Dynamic atomicity: optimizing swift memory management

Swift is a modern multi-paradigm programming language with an extensive developer community and open source ecosystem. Swift 3's memory management strategy is based on Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) augmented with unsafe APIs for manually-managed memory. We have seen ARC consume as much as 80% of program execution time. A significant portion of ARC's direct performance cost can be attributed to its use of atomic machine instructions to protect reference count updates from data races. Consequently, we have designed and implemented dynamic atomicity, an optimization which safely replaces atomic reference-counting operations with nonatomic ones where feasible. The optimization introduces a store barrier to detect possibly intra-thread references, compiler-generated recursive reference-tracers to find all affected objects, and a bit of state in each reference count to encode its atomicity requirements. Using a suite of 171 microbenchmarks, 9 programs from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, and the Richards benchmark, we performed a limit study by unsafely making all reference counting operations nonatomic. We measured potential speedups of up to 220% on the microbenchmarks, 120% on the Benchmarks Game and 70% on Richards. By automatically reducing ARC overhead, our optimization both improves Swift 3's performance and reduces the temptation for performance-oriented programmers to resort to unsafe manual memory management. Furthermore, the machinery implemented for dynamic atomicity could also be employed to obtain cheaper thread-safe Swift data structures, or to augment ARC with optional cycle detection or a backup tracing garbage collector.

Arduino-Like Development Kit for Single-Element Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrasound imaging is developing an open-source ecosystem, especially for software frameworks. Little exists on the open-hardware side. Hence a focus was put on producing easy-to-use technological (hardware and software) kit to allow anyone - scientists, academics, hackers, makers to have a experimental setup for ultrasound imaging at a low cost, at home, with no specific equipment required. To this end, open source, arduino-like modules have been developed to build a simple, but complete, single channel analog front-end system, where all intermediary signals are readily accessible by the user. A single-channel architecture allows to avoid the beam-forming head, though it limits the quality of the image obtained, and brings robustness to the system. Moreover, complex RF processing, being shifted to the analog side, limits the quality of the final image. These were tested with re-purposed ultrasound mechanical scanner heads, as well as re-purposed medical imaging transducers, and provided interesting images. Moreover, such modules could also be used in RF projects, non-destructive projects, low-cost medical imaging projects.

The Future of Supply Chain Information Systems: The Open Source Ecosystem

The open source phenomenon has made a significant impression, not only on the software industry, but also on software-intensive organizations in both the public and private sectors. The collaborative model offered by the open source ecosystem can potentially change the collective nature of organizations and is claimed to increase innovation and technology adoption while reducing costs. These potential advantages are influencing how organizations acquire software and are leading to significant adoption of open source products across several domains. In fact, a recent Forrester Research report found that 78% of companies surveyed are running part or all of their operations on open source and 66% use open source to create software applications for their customers. Unfortunately, limited research exists regarding the implications and boundaries of open source technologies employed for supply chain management. For a firm to decide whether or not to pursue open source strategies, the field needs more research that helps us to understand how a firm’s use of open source information systems relate to flexibility, agility, operational performance, and the triple bottom line. In this brief thought piece, we describe the potential for open source software to change the nature of supply chain information systems.

Storage-Tag-Aware Scheduler for Hadoop Cluster

Big data analytics has simplified the processing complexity of extremely large data sets through ecosystems, such as Hadoop, MapR, and Cloudera. Apache Hadoop is an open-source ecosystem that manages large data sets in a distributed environment. MapReduce is a programming model that processes massive amount of unstructured data sets over Hadoop cluster. Recently, Hadoop enhances its homogeneous storage function to heterogeneous storage and stores data sets into multiple storage media, i.e., SSD, RAM, and DISK. This development increases the performance of data block placement strategy and allows a client to store large data sets into multiple storage media efficiently than homogeneous storage. However, this evolution increases the consumption of computing capacity and memory usage over MapReduce job scheduling. The scheduler processes MapReduce job into homogeneous container having configuration of CPU, memory, DISK volume, and network I/O, and accesses, processes, and stores data sets over heterogeneous storage media. This produces a processing latency of locating and pairing source data set to MapReduce tasks and results an abnormal high consumption of computing capacity and memory usage in a Datanode. Similarly, when scheduler assigns MapReduce jobs to multiple Datanodes, the same processing latency can severely affect the performance of whole cluster. In this paper, we present Storage-Tag-Aware Scheduler (STAS) that reduces processing latency by scheduling MapReduce jobs into heterogeneous storage containers, i.e., SSD, DISK, and RAM container. STAS endorses job with a tag of storage media, such as $Job_{SSD}$ , $Job_{DISK}$ , and $Job_{RAM}$ and parses them into heterogeneous shared-queues, which assign processing configuration to enlist jobs. STAS manager then schedules shared-queue jobs into heterogeneous MapReduce containers and generates an output into storage media of the cluster. The experimental evaluation shows that STAS optimizes the consumption of computing capacity and memory usage efficiently than available schedulers in a Hadoop cluster.

Kickstarting Semiconductor Innovation with Open Source Hardware

Hardware innovation is slowing, yet software innovation is flourishing, in large part because of a thriving open source ecosystem. Open source can similarly boost hardware development, but the way forward will require industry, academia, and hardware enthusiasts to address five significant issues.

Addressing the security challenges of using containers

Containers have taken the open source ecosystem by storm, providing a fast and effective way to deliver and deploy a compact, portable environment for running applications across shared server resources. Container technology is another breakthrough in the constant drive to increase development agility and get products to market more quickly. Speed and agility are key drivers for container adoption in the enterprise, but those drivers can't be at the expense of security. Enterprises need to take realistic precautions before completely embracing this approach to operating-system-level virtualisation.Containers have taken the open source ecosystem by storm, providing a fast and effective way to deliver and deploy a compact, portable environment for running applications across shared server resources.Container technology is another breakthrough in the constant drive to increase development agility and get products to market more quickly. But that can't be at the expense of security. Enterprises need to take realistic precautions before completely embracing this approach to operating system-level virtualisation, explains Mike Pittenger of Black Duck Software.

Clawpack: building an open source ecosystem for solving hyperbolic PDEs

Clawpack is a software package designed to solve nonlinear hyperbolic partial differential equations using high-resolution finite volume methods based on Riemann solvers and limiters. The package includes a number of variants aimed at different applications and user communities. Clawpack has been actively developed as an open source project for over 20 years. The latest major release, Clawpack 5, introduces a number of new features and changes to the code base and a new development model based on GitHub and Git submodules. This article provides a summary of the most significant changes, the rationale behind some of these changes, and a description of our current development model.

Lessons learned from applying social network analysis on an industrial Free/Libre/Open Source Software ecosystem

Many software projects are no longer done in-house by a single organization. Instead, we are in a new age where software is developed by a networked community of individuals and organizations, which base their relations to each other on mutual interest. Paradoxically, recent research suggests that software development can actually be jointly-developed by rival firms. For instance, it is known that the mobile-device makers Apple and Samsung kept collaborating in open source projects while running expensive patent wars in the court. Taking a case study approach, we explore how rival firms collaborate in the open source arena by employing a multi-method approach that combines qualitative analysis of archival data (QA) with mining software repositories (MSR) and Social Network Analysis (SNA). While exploring collaborative processes within the OpenStack ecosystem, our research contributes to Software Engineering research by exploring the role of groups, sub-communities and business models within a high-networked open source ecosystem. Surprising results point out that competition for the same revenue model (i.e., operating conflicting business models) does not necessary affect collaboration within the ecosystem. Moreover, while detecting the different sub-communities of the OpenStack community, we found out that the expected social tendency of developers to work with developers from same firm (i.e., homophily) did not hold within the OpenStack ecosystem. Furthermore, while addressing a novel, complex and unexplored open source case, this research also contributes to the management literature in coopetition strategy and high-tech entrepreneurship with a rich description on how heterogeneous actors within a high-networked ecosystem (involving individuals, startups, established firms and public organizations) joint-develop a complex infrastructure for big-data in the open source arena.

Enabling Interoperable Cloud Application Management through an Open Source Ecosystem

Cloud computing enables on-demand provisioning of computing resources to IT solutions, following a utility-based approach. Technology and standardization developments in traditional public utilities enable customers to seamlessly migrate across utility providers without being required to make changes to their home appliances. Dubbed as the fifth utility, cloud computing customers should have user-friendly tools and mechanisms at their disposal, which preserve application deployments across different resource providers. Here, the authors present current efforts to develop an open source Cloud Application Management Framework (CAMF) based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. This framework facilitates cloud application lifecycle management in a vendor-neutral approach.

Reducing Resource Consumption of SELinux for Embedded Systems with Contributions to Open-Source Ecosystems

Reducing Resource Consumption of SELinux for Embedded Systems with Contributions to Open-Source Ecosystems

Measuring the health of open source software ecosystems: Beyond the scope of project health

BackgroundThe livelihood of an open source ecosystem is important to different ecosystem participants: software developers, end-users, investors, and participants want to know whether their ecosystem is healthy and performing well. Currently, there exists no working operationalization available that can be used to determine the health of open source ecosystems. Health is typically looked at from a project scope, not from an ecosystem scope. ObjectivesWith such an operationalization, stakeholders can make better decisions on whether to invest in an ecosystem: developers can select the healthiest ecosystem to join, keystone organizers can establish which governance techniques are effective, and end-users can select ecosystems that are robust, will live long, and prosper. MethodDesign research is used to create the health operationalization. The evaluation step is done using four ecosystem health projects from literature. ResultsThe Open Source Ecosystem Health Operationalization is provided, which establishes the health of a complete software ecosystem, using the data from collections of open source projects that belong to the ecosystem. ConclusionThe groundwork is done, by providing a summary of research challenges, for more research in ecosystem health. With the operationalization in hand, researchers no longer need to start from scratch when researching open source ecosystems’ health.

Overcoming Barriers to Collaboration in an Open Source Ecosystem

IntroductionCollaboration is the act of working with another individual or grouping to create something. It involves working jointly and openly with others. When collaborators bring their own diverse skills and experience – and new perspectives – the potential for innovation is great. However, collaboration is far from easy, and the diversity that brings benefits to the

Overcoming Barriers to Collaboration in an Open Source Ecosystem

IntroductionCollaboration is the act of working with another individual or grouping to create something. It involves working jointly and openly with others. When collaborators bring their own diverse skills and experience – and new perspectives – the potential for innovation is great. However, collaboration is far from easy, and the diversity that brings benefits to the

Q&A. Is Open Source Sustainable?

Q. Is Open Source Sustainable?A. In 2008, many thought the open source movement could not survive the widespread adoption of open source software without commensurate contributions back, whether in code or cash. Since that time, however, open source has flourished, and it has become robustly self-sustaining.This dramatic improvement in the health of the open-source ecosystem

Q&A. Is Open Source Sustainable?

Q. Is Open Source Sustainable?A. In 2008, many thought the open source movement could not survive the widespread adoption of open source software without commensurate contributions back, whether in code or cash. Since that time, however, open source has flourished, and it has become robustly self-sustaining.This dramatic improvement in the health of the open-source ecosystem

From proprietary to open source—Growing an open source ecosystem

In today's business and software arena, Free/Libre/Open Source Software has emerged as a promising platform for software ecosystems. Following this trend, more and more companies are releasing their proprietary software as open source, forming a software ecosystem of related development projects complemented with a social ecosystem of community members. Since the trend is relatively recent, there are few guidelines on how to create and maintain a sustainable open source ecosystem for a proprietary software. This paper studies the problem of building open source communities for industrial software that was originally developed as closed source. Supporting processes, guidelines and best practices are discussed and illustrated through an industrial case study. The research is paving the road for new directions in growing a thriving open source ecosystem.

Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories

Several public repositories and archives of “facts” about libre software projects, maintained either by open source communities or by research communities, have been flourishing over the Web in recent years. These have enabled new analysis and support for new quality assurance tasks. This paper presents some complementary existing tools, projects and models proposed both by OSS actors or research initiatives that are likely to lead to useful future developments in terms of study of the FLOSS phenomenon, and also to the very practitioners in the FLOSS development projects. A goal of the research conducted within the HELIOS project is to address bugs traceability issues. In this regard, the authors investigate the potential of using Semantic Web technologies in navigating between many different bugtracker systems scattered all over the open source ecosystem. By using Semantic Web techniques, it is possible to interconnect the databases containing data about open-source software projects development, which enables OSS partakers to identify resources, annotate them, and further interlink those using dedicated properties and collectively designing a distributed semantic graph.

Analysis of the open source software sector in China

Summary The paper describes the status and context of the Chinese Open Source Software (OSS) industry and ecosystem based on the analysis of the components of the China OSS Promotion Union. The analysis involves comparisons of several main Chinese developers of Linux operating system and makers of open source counterpart of the popular Microsoft Office package as well as several main Chinese OSS communities. Comparisons concern the technological and business aspect. The findings reveal peculiarities of the divergence of innovative activities of Chinese companies, as well as indicate that the strong government support may at the same time limit the technology selection under rigid competition, especially as foreign open source companies are found to be more focused on hobbyist developers and are able to maintain larger independent communities. Implications of the paper include the need to coordinate global development efforts and adjust science & technology policies in order to stimulate both the development and the diffusion of open source among Chinese companies and individual hobbyists.

Open source business models: ready for prime time

Open source software was ready for any enterprise by putting its full corporate support behind Linux, the open source ecosystem has matured into a shoulder-to-shoulder companion for commercial proprietary software. A new tapestry of community resources, venture capital, and informal networks of open source veterans championing new applications is being woven through industries and academia. What open source software really does is open up the low end of the market, and it certainly changes dynamics on the global stage.