Computer Engineering Commons^™

Programmer Friendly Refactoring Tools, Emerson Murphy-Hill

Dissertations and Theses

Tools that perform semi-automated refactoring are currently under-utilized by programmers. If more programmers adopted refactoring tools, software projects could make enormous productivity gains. However, as more advanced refactoring tools are designed, a great chasm widens between how the tools must be used and how programmers want to use them. This dissertation begins to bridge this chasm by exposing usability guidelines to direct the design of the next generation of programmer-friendly refactoring tools, so that refactoring tools fit the way programmers behave, not vice-versa.

Is Parallel Programming Hard, And If So, Why?, Paul E. Mckenney, Maged M. Michael, Manish Gupta, Philip William Howard, Josh Triplett, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Of the 200+ parallel-programming languages and environments created in the 1990s, almost all are now defunct. Given that parallel systems are now well within the budget of the typical hobbyist or graduate student, it is not unreasonable to expect a new cohort in excess of several thousand parallel languages and environments to appear in the 2010s. If this expected new cohort is to have more practical impact than did its 1990s counterpart, a robust and widely applicable framework will be required that encompasses exactly what, if anything, is hard about parallel programming. This paper revisits the fundamental precepts of concurrent …

Graphical User Interfaces As Updatable Views, James Felger Terwilliger

Dissertations and Theses

In contrast to a traditional setting where users express queries against the database schema, we assert that the semantics of data can often be understood by viewing the data in the context of the user interface (UI) of the software tool used to enter the data. That is, we believe that users will understand the data in a database by seeing the labels, dropdown menus, tool tips, help text, control contents, and juxtaposition or arrangement of controls that are built in to the user interface. Our goal is to allow domain experts with little technical skill to understand and query …

Dynamic Task Prediction For An Spmt Architecture Based On Control Independence, Komal Jothi

Dissertations and Theses

Exploiting better performance from computer programs translates to finding more instructions to execute in parallel. Since most general purpose programs are written in an imperatively sequential manner, closely lying instructions are always data dependent, making the designer look far ahead into the program for parallelism. This necessitates wider superscalar processors with larger instruction windows. But superscalars suffer from three key limitations, their inability to scale, sequential fetch bottleneck and high branch misprediction penalty. Recent studies indicate that current superscalars have reached the end of the road and designers will have to look for newer ideas to build computer processors.

Speculative …

Computational Techniques For Reducing Spectra Of The Giant Planets In Our Solar System, Holly L. Grimes

Dissertations and Theses

The dynamic atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune provide a rich source of meteorological phenomena for scientists to study. To investigate these planets, scientists obtain spectral images of these bodies using various instruments including the Cooled Mid-Infrared Camera and Spectrometer (COMICS) at the Subaru Telescope Facility at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. These spectral images are two-dimensional arrays of double precision floating point values that have been read from a detector array. Such images must be reduced before the information they contain can be analyzed. The reduction process for spectral images from COMICS involves several steps:

1. Sky subtraction: the …