Software Tasks Research Articles

On Mapping of Reconfigurable Hierarchical Tasks to MP-SoC-Oriented Architectures Under Real-Time and Energy Constraints

Mapping complex hierarchical reconfigurable tasks on distributed architectures are classically an NP-hard problem. The current paper introduces a new software specification of these tasks with two-dimensional hierarchy levels DAGs. Each DAG is composed of multi-hierarchical subDAGs to specify graphs of complex software task graphs. We also propose a heuristic algorithm for mapping the new reconfigurable hierarchical model on multi-core MP-SOC architectures. In the proposed software model, an application is seen as a DAG of tasks each of which is considered as a subDAG composed of elementary functions. The proposed algorithm acts in three steps: First, we map the subDAGs at the deepest level of hierarchy into processing units (cluster of processors). Then we map each task on a particular processor. Finally we map elementary functions on processor cores. Experimental results of the proposed algorithms show an increase of performance in terms of execution time and energy consumption. Our algorithm is also efficient in terms of communication cost approved by simulation results applied to large number of tasks.

Descriptions of issues and comments for predicting issue success in software projects

Software development tasks must be performed successfully to achieve software quality and customer satisfaction. Knowing whether software tasks are likely to fail is essential to ensure the success of software projects. Issue Tracking Systems store information of software tasks (issues) and comments, which can be useful to predict issue success; however; almost no research on this topic exists. This work studies the usefulness of textual descriptions of issues and comments for predicting whether issues will be resolved successfully or not. Issues and comments of 588 software projects were extracted from four popular Issue Tracking Systems. Seven machine learning classifiers were trained on 30k issues and more than 120k comments, and more than 6000 experiments were performed to predict the success of three types of issues: bugs, improvements and new features. The results provided evidence that descriptions of issues and comments are useful for predicting issue success with more than 85% of accuracy and precision, and that the predictions of issue success vary over time. Words related to software development were particularly relevant for predicting issue success. Other communication aspects and their relationship to the success of software projects must be researched in detail using data from software tools.

Block and Random Practice: A Wii Fit Dynamic Balance Training in Older Adults

ABSTRACT Purpose: To compare the effectiveness of blocked and random practice schedules of balance training in dynamic balance abilities of older adults using Wii Fit balance game tasks. Method: Forty-one participants who were not receiving hospice care or living in a nursing home participated. Three Wii Fit balance tasks (tasks A, B, and C) were selected for training, and one task (task D) was selected as the transfer test among the nine tasks in the Wii Fit balance game software. Scores for tasks A and D were evaluated. Completion times for tasks B and C were evaluated. Moved distance for the functional reach test (FRT), completion time for the timed up and go test (TUG), and performance score for the Tinetti performance‐oriented mobility assessment (POMA) were also tested as clinical balance assessment outcomes. Results: The training significantly improved the performance outcomes of clinical balance assessments and task D. There were no significant group × time interaction effects and no significant main effects by group during the acquisition and retention periods of tasks A, B, and C. However, significant main effects by time were observed for tasks A, B, and C. Conclusions: When dynamic balance training such as the Wii Fit balance system is administered to older adults in a clinical setting, either a block or a random practice schedule can be effectively used to improve the dynamic balance skills. Wii Fit–based balance training is clinically effective for improving the dynamic balance ability.

An Innovative Scheme of Reconciling IDEs Energetic Evidence to Provide Software Missions

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the essential apparatus utilized by engineers to keep up programming framework. Current IDEs such an Eclipse IDE present static perspective on source code, yet such view ignoring data about runtime conduct of programming frameworks. Since common item arranged frameworks make significant utilization of polymorphism and dynamic official, static perspectives will miss the key data about runtime. An approach Senses used to collect and integrate dynamic information with static view of source code. Dynamic data race and memory leak is hard to detect in IDEs. A memory spill is capacity is distributed anyway that the program not wants. the premier normal mechanical criteria wont to affirm if a program still wants some tad of capacity is whether that memory will be come to from the present choice stack or world factors, that is whether that memory is root open. Capacity that is designated anyway not root available is unmistakably a break: there is no feasible way for the program to utilize that capacity again. This work exhibits a location of information races and memory spills are precisely and proficiently. The software tasks are maintained by improving the Correctness This paper present detection of data race and memory leak is accurately, effectively and efficiently.

Dynamic scheduler implementation used for load distribution between hardware accelerators (RTL) and software tasks (CPU) in heterogeneous systems

This article describes the implementation of a dynamic scheduler for loading distribution between a hardware accelerator RTL and a CPU software task. The basic composition of a Xilinx-Zynq SoC device is a processing system (PS), coupled with FPGA programmable logic (PL). The two sections are connected via a number of Advanced eXtensible Interfaces. Hardware accelerators are mechanisms whereby different software algorithms are implemented register transfer logic (RTL) in the PL module. These accelerators determine an increased processing speed. In this article, we present a dynamic scheduler used for distribution of the load between the host processor and the RTL accelerator. There are situations in which even with increased processing speed of the accelerator, it cannot cope with the flow of data coming from memory system (shared memory). Therefore, it is necessary for this accelerator to be “aided” by a software module running in a CPU in the PS section. The article describes a scheduler that checks whether a hardware module for data processing meets the requirement of Hard Real Time (data are processed within a well-defined time frame), and in case it does not, it activates a software thread running on a CPU to support the hardware thread (out of the whole amount of data to be processed by the RTL thread, some of it is processed by the SW thread. Thus, the RTL thread will have less data to process). The scheduler activates the SW thread only when the system has to respond in real time and the amount of data cannot be processed within a certain time. Thus, the scheduler detects the need to activate the software thread that “helps” the hardware thread to process the data. The scheduler self-adjusts so that it executes a number of instructions in the software thread at all times, without introducing delays in running the RTL thread which is much faster. For this project PYNQ Z2 board, Vivado 2018.3 and Jupyter Notebook tools have been used.

Efficient FPSoC Prototyping of FCS-MPC for Three-Phase Voltage Source Inverters

This work describes an efficient implementation in terms of computation time and resource usage in a Field-Programmable System-On-Chip (FPSoC) of a Finite Control Set Model Predictive Control (FCS-MPC) algorithm. As an example, the FCS-MPC implementation is used for the current reference tracking of a two-level three-phase power converter. The proposed solution is an enabler for using both complex control algorithms and digital controllers for high switching frequency semiconductor technologies. An original HW/SW (hardware and software) system architecture for an FPSoC is designed to take advantage of a modern operating system, while removing time uncertainty in real-time software tasks, and exploiting dedicated FPGA fabric for the most complex computations. In addition, two different architectures for the FPGA-implemented functionality are proposed and compared in order to study the area-speed trade-off. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed implementation, which achieves a speed hundreds of times faster than the conventional Digital Signal Processor (DSP)-based control platform.

Scheduling periodic and aperiodic tasks with time, energy harvesting and precedence constraints on multi-core systems

This paper deals with the real-time scheduling problem of multi-core systems powered by renewable energy harvested from environment. They handle two types of software tasks which are mapped to cores statically and not allowed to migrate. A task can be periodic which may depend on other tasks’ results, or aperiodic which is added to the system to cope with external interruptions. The uncertainty of energy availability in energy harvesting systems makes real-time scheduling more challenging because energy constraints can be violated to ensure real-time performance. A novel scheduling strategy is proposed to effectively compute deadlines allowing for tasks and messages to meet related constraints. This method consists of two phases, (i) the first one defines different time slots each of which is characterized by energy and frequency parameters to cope with the energy availability issue, and (ii) the second one calculates the deadlines ensuring real-time system feasibility by considering the invocation of aperiodic task execution and task precedence constraints. The originality of the current work compared with related studies is that it deals with multi-core, periodic and aperiodic tasks, dependency, energy harvesting, and real-time aspects simultaneously.

Knowledge-Oriented Models Based on Developer-Artifact and Developer-Developer Interactions

INTRODUCTION: Software development is organized around developers working collaboratively promoting two types of interactions for knowledge sharing. Developer-Artifact interactions indicate developers define or access pieces of information within artifacts. Developer-Developer interactions indicate the exchange of information among developers using a collaboration platform to clarify an issue, promote an idea, or expose any thoughtful comment. PROBLEM: The number of such interactions grows over time and makes it difficult to capture and assess the evolution of the developers’ knowledge about specific software project artifacts and tasks. Further, this knowledge decreases over time due to the natural limitations of human cognition that restrict our capabilities to cope with information overload. Besides, who has more knowledge about specific project elements are important to promote collaboration. AIMS: The $K_{a}$ , $K_{s}$ , $K_{c}$ , and $K_{p}$ models capture the evolution of the developers’ knowledge about software project elements such as artifacts, tasks, similar tasks, and the whole software project. These models represent not only the knowledge developers have about these elements but also capture how this knowledge decreases over time based on forgetting and relearning functions. EVALUATION: An experimental study analyzed some developers’ interactions on artifacts for the purpose of predicting the evolution of developers’ knowledge in six software projects. The results show that the developers’ rankings by performed tasks and by our models have 72% or more of similarity. CONCLUSION: Our models can capture and assess the evolution of the developers’ knowledge and help to identify which developers have more knowledge about specific elements of software projects.

A multi-purpose user interface for the iFDAQ of the COMPASS experiment

In HEP experiments, remote access to control systems is one of the fundamental pillars of efficient operations. At the same time, development of user interfaces with emphasis on usability can be one of the most labor-intensive software tasks to be undertaken in the life cycle of an experiment. While desirable, the development and maintenance of a large variety of interfaces (e.g., desktop control interface, web monitoring interface, development API...) is often simply not feasible, as far as manpower is concerned. We present a solution employed in the control software of the iFDAQ of the COMPASS experiment at CERN. Being a mix of a command-line and terminal tool, this interface can fulfill the roles of a dynamic monitoring interface, a control interface, and a scripting API simultaneously. Furthermore, it can easily be used as a remote access tool for operations experts, needing nearly no setup user-side and being compatible with smartphones. We also discuss the methodology and results of a concrete use case – automated run control for performance tests of the iFDAQ readout software.

Modern Software Stack Building for HEP

High-Energy Physics has evolved a rich set of software packages that need to work harmoniously to carry out the key software tasks needed by experiments. The problem of consistently building and deploying these packages as a coherent software stack is one that is shared across the HEP community. To that end the HEP Software Foundation Packaging Working Group has worked to identify common solutions that can be used across experiments, with an emphasis on consistent, reproducible builds and easy deployment into CernVM-FS or containers via CI systems. We based our approach on well-identified use cases and requirements from many experiments. In this paper we summarise the work of the group in the last year and how we have explored various approaches based on package managers from industry and the scientific computing community. We give details about a solution based on the Spack package manager which has been used to build the software required by the SuperNEMO and FCC experiments and trialled for a multi-experiment software stack, Key4hep. We shall discuss changes that needed to be made to Spack to satisfy all our requirements. We show how support for a build environment for software developers is provided.

An Empirical Study on the Ability Relationships Between Programming and Testing

Under the software quality management mechanism, developers are generally required to review and test their own code firstly to ensure that the submitted code meets specific quality standards. At the same time, with the popularity of test-driven development (TDD) and extreme programming (XP), programming and testing are complementary in the process of software development, i.e., software testing has become as important as programming. Despite its importance, there is no empirical study that investigates the ability relationships between programming and testing. This article presents such a study, where we designed software tasks to investigate the ability of programming and testing. We distributed the program tasks to software vocational students and analyzed the results from multiple dimensions. Our main findings show that (i) almost half of the developers with strong programming ability do not have a good testing ability; (ii) some developers with weak programming ability can do well in testing; (iii) compared with programming ability, testing fundamentals have a greater impact on the testing ability; and (iv) most developers can do well at finding bugs but lack experience in writing test scripts.

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ СПІРАЛЬНОЇ МОДЕЛІ ДЛЯ ВИПРОБУВАНЬ ПРОГРАМНОГО ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ ЗАСОБІВ ВИМІРЮВАЛЬНОЇ ТЕХНІКИ

The article presents a comparative analysis of different methods of designing, testing and testing of software for various purposes. For a more detailed analysis of the application for software design, a spiral model was selected and its advantages and disadvantages were analyzed. Although the spiral model has a complicated structure to compare it with other models, its use is appropriate for the development of software for measuring instruments (MI), which can be attributed to middle- and high-risk software. Proper use of the spiral model contributes to the avoidance of deliberate damage to the software, that is increases the level of software protection. The modified spiral model of software development that can be applied to software development of MI is presented. It is established that only the stages of conceptual definition of the software development project, conceptual prototype of the software and definition of general requirements for the software, as well as the stages of set for testing, module design, coding, module testing, acceptance and passing tests have their specific features for the MI software. When developing software for measuring instruments, you must take into account the testing features of the software modules, memory, storage devices and data transfer devices. The stage of the spiral model related to the software test is detailed, taking into account all the specific components of the software test, both built in MI and installed on universal computers. The necessity to set the level of division of software into legislatively significant and other parts is taken into account. For the testing tasks of the MI software, the sequence of verification of the software components is defined, such as the verification of the readability of the MI software, the verification of storage devices and the verification of data transfer devices, taking into account the requirements of documents and recommendations of international and regional metrology organizations. It has been established that acceptance tests of the MI software cannot be completed without eliminating the discrepancies found by the developer.

Using freely-available 3D software to reconstruct traumatic bone injuries detected with post mortem computed tomography.

Use of post-mortem computed tomography (PMCT) scanning to investigate natural and unnatural death has increased dramatically in recent years. Powerful software exists to allow detailed analysis of the scanned anatomy and pathology, and users of PMCT and other medical imaging will already be familiar with both two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3D) representations of this data. However, standard medical image viewing programs do not allow direct manipulation of the visible anatomy. By extracting anatomical features from medical images, this data can be exported into 3D manipulation software to enhance pathological examination and anatomical demonstration. Here we illustrate, using an example of lower limb fractures from a pedestrian road traffic fatality, that open source software (Blender) can be used not only to manipulate the anatomical data, but to produce high-quality images and animations that are superior to what is achievable using the available output of standard medical image viewers. The described software provides practitioners from many different disciplines an ability to manipulate medical imaging data that may previously have seemed too expensive or otherwise inaccessible. The potential applications for this technique are not limited to trauma analysis, and the purpose of this document is to encourage others to explore this powerful software and its abilities. The article contains many specific terms, and targeted online searches using this vocabulary will reveal an abundance of guidance and video tutorials that will help even the complete novice begin to undertake apparently sophisticated 3D software tasks with relative ease and at no additional cost.

Schedulability Analysis of Engine Control Systems With Dynamic Switching Speeds

In cyber-physical systems, certain tasks are activated according to a rotation source. For example, angular tasks in engine control units are triggered whenever the engine crankshaft reaches a specific angular position. To reduce the workload at high speeds, these tasks also adopt different implementations within different rotation speed intervals. However, current studies are limited to the case that the switching speeds at which task implementations should change are configured at design time. In this article, we propose to dynamically adjust the switching speeds at runtime. We develop schedulability analysis techniques for such systems, including a new digraph-based task model to safely approximate the workload from software tasks triggered at predefined rotation angles. We prove that such task transformation has bounded pessimism. We present exact algorithms to find a finite number of representatives to avoid enumerating (an infinite number of) all job sequences. Experiments on synthetic task systems demonstrate that the proposed approach provides substantial benefits on system schedulability.

Unsupervised software repositories mining and its application to code search

SummarySoftware repositories are crucial resources for many software tasks, including code retrieval and annotation. Programming forums provide questions and answers (Q&A) from software developers, containing abundant code‐description posts for exchanging knowledge about programming issues. However, most posts provide personal opinions of users that are often not adequately confirmed or outdated. Mining software repositories in such open and unrestricted forums is challenging. Since the posts can be arbitrary and noisy, it is difficult to get unified labels for supervised noise elimination. Different from existing mining approaches, this paper proposes Code‐Description Mining Framework (CodeMF), an unsupervised framework to eliminate noisy posts and extract high quality software repositories from programming forums. CodeMF treats all social features of the posts as discrete‐time signals for kernel principal component analysis and further performs wavelet transform feature fusion to find the delicate changes (noises in temporal signals). We conduct comprehensive experiments on StackOverflow. Experimental results demonstrate that CodeMF can effectively reduce running time and improve precision via mining high‐quality software repositories for various programming languages, especially for the large‐scale codebases. To further illustrate the effect of CodeMF applied in software tasks, we introduce it to improve the performance of query‐expansion code search. Meanwhile, for SQL and C# programs, compared to the state‐of‐the‐art query‐expansion method QECK, the improvement of QECKCodeMF is 2% and 6% on Recall@10, and 4% and 14% on mean reciprocal rank, respectively.

ACTman: Automated preprocessing and analysis of actigraphy data

ObjectivesTo introduce a novel software-library called Actigraphy Manager (ACTman) which automates labor-intensive actigraphy data preprocessing and analyses steps while improving transparency, reproducibility, and scalability over software suites traditionally used in actigraphy research practice. DesignDescriptive. MethodsUse cases are described for performing a common actigraphy task in ACTman and alternative actigraphy software. Important inefficiencies in actigraphy workflow are identified and their consequences are described. We explain how these hinder the feasibility of conducting studies with large groups of athletes and/or longer data collection periods. Thereafter, the information flow through the ACTman software is described and we explain how it alleviates aforementioned inefficiencies. Furthermore, transparency, reproducibility, and scalability issues of commonly used actigraphy software packages are discussed and compared with the ACTman package. ResultsIt is shown that from an end-user perspective ACTman offers a compact workflow as it automates many preprocessing and analysis steps that otherwise have to be performed manually. When considering transparency, reproducibility, and scalability the design of the ACTman software is found to outperform proprietary and open-source actigraphy software suites. As such, ACTman alleviates important bottlenecks within actigraphy research practice. ConclusionsACTman facilitates the current transition towards larger datasets containing data of multiple athletes by automating labor-intensive preprocessing and analyses steps within actigraphy research. Furthermore, ACTman offers many features which enhance user-convenience and analysis customization, such as moving window functionality and period selection options. ACTman is open-source and thus fully verifiable, in contrast with many proprietary software packages which remain a black box for researchers.

Onboard simulator for emergency situations training of the space station crew

The article deals with the structure of the simulator for the training of the space station (SS) crew activity in an emergency situation. A brief history of the matter is given. The purpose of the simulator is to provide the crew with the possibility to carry out training (having the required correspondence of real) activities to parry emergency situations while ensuring the minimum of total cost of simulator ownership. The functions and tasks of the simulator that follow from the stated goal are given. The simulator is considered as a complex distributed information system including sets of data: • goals and tasks; • structure of the simulator; • conditions: requirements, external and internal factors affecting the creation and functioning of the simulator. The structure of the simulator is presented in the form of the following sets: • staf; • technical means of the simulator; • composition of the elements of the simulator. The staff of the simulator includes administrators, instructors, mission control centers (MCC) operators, crew. Technical means of the simulator are presented in the form of a set, which includes set of hardware, set of software tools and a database. To create the simulator, the borrowed means of the space complex (SC) are used: the communication system, the local networks of the SS and MCC, participating in flight management, and the global Internet. The structure and tasks of the simulator software are considered, including the software of the on-board server, ground servers, the on-board mobile terminal, the user's ground-based workstation. The simulator scheme includes on-board and ground subsystems interacting with each other using the standard ground-to-board communication system. The presented simulator can be used for working out of actions of the personnel for liquidation of emergency situations on complex objects, including a large number of personnel and technical means. Key words: simulator structure, training, emergency situation, crew, flight control center, simulator software.

Schedulability analysis of real-time multiframe cosimulations on multicore platforms

For real-time simulations, the fidelity of simulation depends not only on the functional accuracy of simulation but also on its timeliness. It is helpful for simulation designers if they can analyze and verify that a simulation will always meet its timing requirements without unnecessarily sacrificing functional accuracy. Abstracting the simulated processes simply as software tasks allows us to transform the problem of verifying timeliness into a schedulability analysis problem where tasks are checked as to whether they are schedulable under the timing constraints or not. In this paper we extend a timed automaton-based framework due to Fersman and Yi for schedulability analysis of real-time systems, for the special case of real-time multiframe cosimulations. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to analyze the schedulability of single- or multiframe real-time simulations. We found that there are some special requirements posed by multiframe simulations, which necessitate changes and improvements in the existing framework designed for actual real-time systems. We made the required theoretical extensions to the framework and implemented our extended framework in UPPAAL, a tool for modeling, simulation, and verification of real-time systems modeled as timed automata. The functional correctness and resource requirements of the implemented framework are then demonstrated using simple examples.

Developer recommendation for Topcoder through a meta-learning based policy model

Crowdsourcing Software Development (CSD) has emerged as a new software development paradigm. Topcoder is now the largest competition-based CSD platform. Many organizations use Topcoder to outsource their software tasks to crowd developers in the form of open challenges. To facilitate timely completion of the crowdsourced tasks, it is important to find right developers who are more likely to win a challenge. Recently, many developer recommendation methods for CSD platforms have been proposed. However, these methods often make unrealistic assumptions about developer status or application scenarios. For example, they consider only skillful developers or only developers registered with the challenges. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning based policy model, which firstly filters out those developers who are unlikely to participate in or submit to a given challenge and then recommend the top k developers with the highest possibility of winning the challenge. We have collected Topcoder data between 2009 and 2018 to evaluate the proposed approach. The results show that our approach can successfully identify developers for posted challenges regardless of the current registration status of the developers. In particular, our approach works well in recommending new winners. The accuracy for top-5 recommendation ranges from 30.1% to 91.1%, which significantly outperforms the results achieved by the related work.

Clusterwise Peak Detection and Filtering Based on Spatial Distribution To Efficiently Mine Mass Spectrometry Imaging Data

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) has the potential to reveal the localization of thousands of biomolecules such as metabolites and lipids in tissue sections. The increase in both mass and spatial resolution of today’s instruments brings on considerable challenges in terms of data processing; accurately extracting meaningful signals from the large data sets generated by MSI without losing information that could be clinically relevant is one of the most fundamental tasks of analysis software. Ion images of the biomolecules are generated by visualizing their intensities in 2-D space using mass spectra collected across the tissue section. The intensities are often calculated by summing each compound’s signal between predefined sets of borders (bins) in the m/z dimension. This approach, however, can result in mixed signals from different compounds in the same bin or splitting the signal from one compound between two adjacent bins, leading to low quality ion images. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel data processing approach. Our approach consists of a sensitive peak detection method able to discover both faint and localized signals by utilizing clusterwise kernel density estimates (KDEs) of peak distributions. We show that our method can recall more ground-truth molecules, molecule fragments, and isotopes than existing methods based on binning. Furthermore, it automatically detects previously reported molecular ions of lipids, including those close in m/z, in an experimental data set.