Support Application Development Research Articles

Compiler-assisted performance tuning

The enormous and growing complexity of today's high-end systems has increased the already significant challenge of maximizing performance on today's equally complex scientific applications. In this paper, we discuss the role of compiler technology in supporting application developers in a systematic approach to performance tuning of key application components. Based on scenarios taken from manual optimization of scientific codes, we describe how compiler support can enable the programmer to achieve the same or better performance in a much more productive way. We also present examples derived automatically from compiler optimization that show results comparable to hand-tuned performance.

Introduce: An Open Source Toolkit for Rapid Development of Strongly Typed Grid Services

Service-oriented architectures and applications have gained wide acceptance in the Grid computing community. A number of tools and middleware systems have been developed to support application development using Grid Services architectures. Most of these efforts, however, have focused on low-level support for management and execution of Grid services, management of Grid-enabled resources, and deployment and execution of applications that make use of Grid services. Simple-to-use service development tools, which would allow a Grid service developer to leverage Grid technologies without needing to know low-level details, are becoming increasingly important for wider application of the Grid. In this paper, we describe an open-source, extensible toolkit, called Introduce, that supports easy development and deployment of Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) compliant services. Introduce is designed to reduce the service development and deployment effort by hiding low level details of the Globus Toolkit and to enable the implementation of strongly typed services. In strongly typed services, a service produces and consumes data types that are well-defined and published in the Grid. This enables data-level syntactic interoperability so that clients and services can access and consume data elements programmatically and correctly. We expect that enabling strongly typed Grid services while lowering the difficulty of entry to the Grid via toolkits like Introduce will have a major impact to the success of the Grid and its wider adoption as a viable technology of choice in the commercial sector as well as in academic, medical, and government research.

Knowledge discovery standards

As knowledge discovery (KD) matures and enters the mainstream, there is an onus on the technology developers to provide the technology in a deployable, embeddable form. This transition from a stand-alone technology, in the control of the knowledgeable few, to a widely accessible and usable technology will require the development of standards. These standards need to be designed to address various aspects of KD ranging from the actual process of applying the technology in a business environment, so as to make the process more transparent and repeatable, through to the representation of knowledge generated and the support for application developers. The large variety of data and model formats that researchers and practitioners have to deal with and the lack of procedural support in KD have prompted a number of standardization efforts in recent years, led by industry and supported by the KD community at large. This paper provides an overview of the most prominent of these standards and highlights how they relate to each other using some example applications of these standards.

Dynamic knowledge validation and verification for CBR teledermatology system

Case-based reasoning has been of great importance in the development of many decision support applications. However, relatively little effort has gone into investigating how new knowledge can be validated. Knowledge validation is important in dealing with imperfect data collected over time, because inconsistencies in data do occur and adversely affect the performance of a diagnostic system. This paper consists of two parts. First, it describes methods that enable the domain expert, who may not be familiar with machine learning, to interactively validate knowledge base of a Web-based teledermatology system. The validation techniques involve decision tree classification and formal concept analysis. Second, it describes techniques to discover unusual relationships hidden in the dataset for building and updating a comprehensive knowledge base, because the diagnostic performance of the system is highly dependent on the content thereof. Therefore, in order to classify different kinds of diseases, it is desirable to have a knowledge base that covers common as well as uncommon diagnoses. Evaluation results show that the knowledge validation techniques are effective in keeping the knowledge base consistent, and that the query refinement techniques are useful in improving the comprehensiveness of the case base.

Soma

Current mobile and distributed applications are being developed using J2ME, J2EE, CORBA, DCOM, etc. Developing applications for distributed and mobile systems is a tedious process, because the applications in these systems are open for change in requirements. So providing a language support for application development in open systems is vital. Component-oriented programming is well suited for open systems [1]. The component interactions is the key issue in composition languages. Software systems can be viewed in two distinct ways. A running system can be seen as a collection of interacting entities. However, at the level of system specification we can view the system as a composition of various software components [1]. To specify systems consisting of interacting components, a composition language is required. Applications built in these languages satisfy the requirements of an open system. Thus there is a need to develop a composition language. The key challenge is to define a set of operators in the language which represent different coordination styles.

Coupling Multicomponent Models with MPH on Distributed Memory Computer Architectures

A growing trend in developing large and complex applications on today’s Teraflop-scale computers is to integrate standalone and/or semi-independent program components into a comprehensive simulation package. One example is the Community Climate System Model, which consists of atmosphere, ocean, land-surface, and sea ice components. Each component is semi-independent and has been developed at a different institution. We study how this multicomponent, multi-executable application can run effectively on distributed memory architectures. For the first time, we clearly identify five effective execution modes and develop the MPH library to support application development utilizing these modes. MPH performs component-name registration, resource allocation and initial component handshaking in a flexible way.

Supporting application development in the semantic web

The Semantic Web augments the current WWW by giving information a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. This is done by adding machine understandable content to Web resources. Such added content is called metadata, whose semantics is provided by referring to an ontology---a domain's conceptualization agreed upon by a community. The Semantic Web relies on the complex interaction of several technologies involving ontologies. Therefore, sophisticated Semantic Web applications typically comprise more than one software module. Instead of coming up with proprietary solutions, developers should be able to rely on a generic infrastructure for application development in this context. We call such an infrastructure Application Server for the Semantic Web whose design and development are based on existing Application Servers. However, we apply and augment their underlying concepts for use in the Semantic Web and integrate semantic technology within the server itself. The article discusses requirements and design issues of such a server, presents our implementation KAON SERVER and demonstrates its usefulness by a detailed scenario.

Dynamically reconfigurable vision-based user interfaces

We describe a system that supports practical, vision-based user interfaces, addressing the issues of a usable interaction paradigm, support for application developers, and support for application deployment in real-world environments. Interfaces are defined as configurations of predefined interactive widgets that can be moved from one surface to another. Complex interfaces can be dynamically reconfigured, changing both form and location on the fly, because the functional definition of the interface is decoupled from the specification of its location in the environment. We illustrate the power of such an architecture in the context of projected interactive displays.

Step-by-step mark-up of medical guideline documents

Approaches to formalisation of medical guidelines can be divided into model-centric and document-centric. While model-centric approaches dominate in the development of clinical decision support applications, document-centric, mark-up-based formalisation is suitable for application tasks requiring the ‘literal’ content of the document to be transferred into the formal model. Examples of such tasks are logical verification of the document or compliance analysis of health records. The quality and efficiency of document-centric formalisation can be improved using a decomposition of the whole process into several explicit steps. We present a methodology and software tool supporting the step-by-step formalisation process. The knowledge elements can be marked up in the source text, refined to a tree structure with increasing level of detail, rearranged into an xml knowledge base, and, finally, exported into the operational representation. User-definable transformation rules enable to automate a large part of the process. The approach is being tested in the domain of cardiology. For parts of the WHO/ISH Guidelines for Hypertension, the process has been carried out through all the stages, to the form of executable application, generated automatically from the xml knowledge base.

Higher Quality Requirements: Supporting Joint Application Development with the Nominal Group Technique

Miscommunication among systems developers and users has plagued systems requirements determination under conventional approaches and has contributed to several systems failures. Joint Application Development (JAD) was introduced to alleviate this problem by bringing together developers, users, and managers in face-to-face workshops designed to produce higher quality requirements. However, JAD sessions are conducted under the freely interacting group structure, which makes them susceptible to many of the classical problems commonly encountered during group deliberations. In this paper we present a case for integrating JAD and the nominal group technique (NGT), a group protocol that was designed to solve problems similar to those encountered in JAD. We tested our proposition in a laboratory experiment consisting of 24 group sessions, in which professional JAD facilitators led a diverse group of business professionals, managers, and advanced business students in specifying high-level requirements (under JAD and with the integrated techniques) for a simulated IS problem. The neutral and objective measures of their effects on the quality of the resulting requirements indicate that the combination of these group process structures seems to neutralize the negative impacts of group dynamics often experienced in JAD sessions, and contributes to improvements in the quality of the requirements.

System design for pixel-parallel image processing

A system design for performing low-level image processing tasks in real time is presented. The design is based on large processor-per-pixel arrays implemented using integrated circuit technology. Two integrated circuit architectures are summarized: an associative parallel processor and a parallel processor employing DRAM cells. In both architectures, the layout pitch of one-bit-wide logic is matched to the pitch of memory cells to form high-density processing element arrays. The system design features an efficient control path implementation, providing high processing element array utilization without demanding complex controller hardware. Sequences of array instructions are generated by a host computer before processing begins, then stored in a simple controller. Once processing begins, the host computer initiates stored sequences to perform pixel-parallel operations. A programming framework implemented using the C++ programming language supports application development. A prototype system employs associative parallel processor devices, a controller, and the programming framework. Three sample applications, smoothing and segmentation, median filtering, and optical flow, establish the suitability of the system for real-time image processing.

HDM—a model-based approach to hypertext application design

Hypertext development should benefit from a systematic, structured development, especially in the case of large and complex applications. A structured approach to hypertext development suggests the notion of authoring-in-the-large . Authoring-in-the-large allows the description of overall classes of information elements and navigational structures of complex applications without much concern with implementation details, and in a system-independent manner. The paper presents HDM (Hypertext Design Model), a first step towards defining a general purpose model for authoring-in-the-large. Some of the most innovative features of HDM are: the notion of perspective ; the identification of different categories of links (structural links, application links, and perspective links) with different representational roles; the distinction between hyperbase and access structures ; and the possibility of easily integrating the structure of a hypertext application with its browsing semantics. HDM can be used in different manners: as a modeling device or as an implementation device. As a modeling device, it supports producing high level specifications of existing or to-be-developed applications. As an implementation device, it is the basis for designing tools that directly support application development. One of the central advantages of HDM in the design and practical construction of hypertext applications is that the definition of a significant number of links can be derived automatically from a conceptual-design level description. Examples of usage of HDM are also included.

Distributed application support: Survey and synthesis of existing approaches

Great advances have been achieved in distributed systems during the last decade. In particular, a rapid technological deployment has taken place in communication networks and protocols. On top of basic communication protocols, several higher-level communication facilities have been developed to support distributed applications. From the application point of view, there is a growing demand for distributed programming. Important example areas are computer-integrated manufacturing and office automation. The paper surveys the distributed application support area, especially focusing on distributed programming and configuration techniques, use of object-oriented techniques, and development support. Several existing approaches are classified and compared with each other. Important communication approaches covered are extended message passing and remote procedure call facilities, as well as new distributed object-oriented interaction mechanisms and multiparty communication support. Important distributed configuration management issues include placement and structure support for distributed applications, dynamic configuration change support, and associated configuration languages. Details are derived from foreign system developments as well as from personal experiences with distributed systems. As an integration effort, the architecture of an object-oriented environment for distributed application development support is outlined. The paper is for researchers interested in further work in the area of distributed systems and software developers interested in a survey of existing mechanisms to support their development work.

Supporting End-User Application Development with the Information Transformation-Analysis-Management Model

Supporting End-User Application Development with the Information Transformation-Analysis-Management Model

High contention in a stock trading database: a case study

Though in general, current database systems adequately support application development and operation for online transaction processing (OLTP), increasing complexity of applications and throughput requirements reveal a number of weaknesses with respect to the data model and implementation techniques used. By presenting the experiences gained from a case study of a large, high volume stock trading system, representative for a broad class of OLTP applications, it is shown, that this particularly holds for dealing with high frequency access to a small number of data elements (hot spots). As a result, we propose extended data types and several novel mechanisms, which are easy to use and highly increase the expressional power of transaction oriented programming, that effectively cope with hot spots. Moreover, their usefulness and their ability to increased parallelism is exemplified by the stock trading application.

A Relational Representation of an Abstract Type System

Programming languages have traditionally had more data types than database systems. The flexibility of abstract types could make a database system more useful in supporting application development. Abstract types allow users to think about and manipulate data in terms and structures that they are familiar with. This paper proposes that databases have a type system interface and describes a representation of a type system in terms of relations. The type system model supports a variety of programming language constructs, such as user-defined parameterized data types and user-defined generic operations. The efficiency of the type system is compared to the access time of the database system.

New Products

Orcatech announces Design Engineering Workstation The Orcatech's Design Engineering Workstation, or DEW, series combines three fundamental building blocks, says the company -high-resolution, fast graphics, computer processing power for the application; and graphics and system software to support application development and execution.