Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Automated Program Profiling And Analysis For Managing Heterogeneous Memory Systems, Adam Palmer Howard

Masters Theses

Many promising memory technologies, such as non-volatile, storage-class memories and high-bandwidth, on-chip RAMs, are beginning to emerge. Since each of these new technologies present tradeoffs distinct from conventional DRAMs, next-generation systems are likely to include multiple tiers of memory storage, each with their own type of devices. To efficiently utilize the available hardware, such systems will need to alter their data management strategies to consider the performance and capabilities provided by each tier.

This work explores a variety of cross-layer strategies for managing application data in heterogeneous memory systems. We propose different program profiling-based techniques to automatically partition program allocation …

Spreadsheet Tools For Data Analysts, Daniel W. Barowy

Doctoral Dissertations

Spreadsheets are a natural fit for data analysis, combining a simple data storage and presentation layer with a programming language and basic debugging tools. Because spreadsheets are accessible and flexible, they are used by both novices and experts. Consequently, spreadsheets are hugely popular, with more than 750 million copies of Microsoft Excel installed worldwide. This popularity means that spreadsheets are the most popular programming language on the planet and the de facto tool for data analysis. Nevertheless, spreadsheets do not address a number of important tasks in a typical analyst's pipeline, and their design frequently complicates them. This thesis describes …

Testing And Debugging: A Reality Check, Pavneet Singh Kochhar

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Testing and debugging are important activities during software development and maintenance. Testing is performed to check if the code contains errors whereas debugging is done to locate and fix these errors. Testing can be manual or automated and can be of different types such as unit, integration, system, stress etc. Debugging can also be manual or automated. These two activities have drawn attention of researchers in the recent years. Past studies have proposed many testing techniques such as automated test generation, test minimization, test case selection etc. Studies related to debugging have proposed new techniques to find bugs using various …

Real-Time Bursty Topic Detection And Virality Forecasting In Microblogs, Wei Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Microblogs such as Twitter have become the largest social platforms for users around the world to share anything happening around them with friends and beyond. A bursty topic in microblogs is one that triggers a surge of relevant tweets within a short period of time, which often reflects important events of mass interest. How to leverage microblogs for early detection and further impact analysis of bursty topics has, therefore, become an important research problem with immense practical value.

Resource Bound Guarantees Via Programming Languages, Michael J. Burrell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We present a programming language in which every well-typed program halts in time polynomial with respect to its input and, more importantly, in which upper bounds on resource requirements can be inferred with certainty. Ensuring that software meets its resource constraints is important in a number of domains, most prominently in hard real-time systems and safety critical systems where failing to meet its time constraints can result in catastrophic failure. The use of test- ing in ensuring resource constraints is of limited use since the testing of every input or environment is impossible in general. Static analysis, whether via the …

Fusing Mobile, Wearable And Infrastructure Sensing For Immersive Daily Lifestyle Analytics, Sougata Sen

Dissertations and Theses Collection

With the prevalence of sensors in public infrastructure as well as in personal devices, exploitation of data from these sensors to monitor and profile basic activities (e.g., locomotive states such as walking, and gestural actions such as smoking) has gained popularity. Basic activities identified by these sensors will drive the next generation of lifestyle monitoring applications and services. To provide more advanced and personalized services, these next-generation systems will need to capture and understand increasingly finer-grained details of various common daily life activities. In this dissertation, I demonstrate the possibility of building systems using offthe- shelf devices, that not only …

Policy-Agnostic Programming On The Client-Side, Kushal Palesha

Master's Projects

Browser security has become a major concern especially due to web pages becoming more complex. These web applications handle a lot of information, including sensitive data that may be vulnerable to attacks like data exfiltration, cross-site scripting (XSS), etc. Most modern browsers have security mechanisms in place to prevent such attacks but they still fall short in preventing more advanced attacks like evolved variants of data exfiltration. Moreover, there is no standard that is followed to implement security into the browser.

A lot of research has been done in the field of information flow security that could prove to be …

Dynamic Information Flow Analysis In Ruby, Vigneshwari Chandrasekaran

Master's Projects

With the rapid increase in usage of the internet and online applications, there is a huge demand for applications to handle data privacy and integrity. Applications are already complex with business logic; adding the data safety logic would make them more complicated. The more complex the code becomes, the more possibilities it opens for security-critical bugs. To solve this conundrum, we can push this data safety handling feature to the language level rather than the application level. With a secure language, developers can write their application without having to worry about data security.

This project introduces dynamic information flow analysis …

Library For Writing Contracts For Java Programs Using Prolog, Yogesh Dixit

Master's Projects

Today many large and complex software systems are being developed in Java. Although, software always has bugs, it is very important that these developed systems are more reliable despite these bugs.

One way that we can help achieve this is the Design by Contract (DbC) paradigm, which was first introduced by Bertrand Meyer, the creator of Eiffel. The concept of DbC was introduced for software developers so that they can produce more reliable software systems with a little extra cost. Using programming contracts allows developer to specify details such as input conditions and expected output conditions. Doing this makes it …

Implementing Dynamic Coarse & Fine Grained Taint Analysis For Rhino Javascript, Tejas Saoji

Master's Projects

Web application systems today are at great risk from attackers. They use methods like cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and format string attacks to exploit vulnerabilities in an application. Standard techniques like static analysis, code audits seem to be inadequate in successfully combating attacks like these. Both the techniques point out the vulnerabilities before an application is run. However, static analysis may result in a higher rate of false positives, and code audits are time-consuming and costly. Hence, there is a need for reliable detection mechanisms.

Dynamic taint analysis offers an alternate solution — it marks the incoming data from the …

Programming Models' Support For Heterogeneous Architecture, Wei Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

Accelerator-enhanced computing platforms have drawn a lot of attention due to their massive peak computational capacity. Heterogeneous systems equipped with accelerators such as GPUs have become the most prominent components of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Even at the node level the significant heterogeneity of CPU and GPU, i.e. hardware and memory space differences, leads to challenges for fully exploiting such complex architectures. Extending outside the node scope, only escalate such challenges.

Conventional programming models such as data- ow and message passing have been widely adopted in HPC communities. When moving towards heterogeneous systems, the lack of GPU integration causes …

Project Arduino, Kevin Ye, Gregory Rouleau, Alan Person, Jabril Muhammad

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Proactive And Reactive Strategies To Handle Surges In Urban Crowds, Jiali Du

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Most urban infrastructures are built to cater a planned capacity, yet surges in usage do happen in times (can be either expected or unexpected), and this has long been a major challenge for urban planner. In this thesis, I propose to study approaches handle surges in urban crowd movement. In particular, the surges in demand studied are limited to situations where a large crowd of commuters/visitors gather in a small vicinity, and I am concerned with their movements both within the vicinity and out of the vicinity (the egress from the vicinity). Significant crowd build-ups and congestions can be observed …

Metafork: A Compilation Framework For Concurrency Models Targeting Hardware Accelerators, Xiaohui Chen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Parallel programming is gaining ground in various domains due to the tremendous computational power that it brings; however, it also requires a substantial code crafting effort to achieve performance improvement. Unfortunately, in most cases, performance tuning has to be accomplished manually by programmers. We argue that automated tuning is necessary due to the combination of the following factors. First, code optimization is machine-dependent. That is, optimization preferred on one machine may be not suitable for another machine. Second, as the possible optimization search space increases, manually finding an optimized configuration is hard. Therefore, developing new compiler techniques for optimizing applications …

Gpumap: A Transparently Gpu-Accelerated Map Function, Ivan Pachev

Master's Theses

As GPGPU computing becomes more popular, it will be used to tackle a wider range of problems. However, due to the current state of GPGPU programming, programmers are typically required to be familiar with the architecture of the GPU in order to effectively program it. Fortunately, there are software packages that attempt to simplify GPGPU programming in higher-level languages such as Java and Python. However, these software packages do not attempt to abstract the GPU-acceleration process completely. Instead, they require programmers to be somewhat familiar with the traditional GPGPU programming model which involves some understanding of GPU threads and kernels. …

A Physics-Based Approach To Modeling Wildland Fire Spread Through Porous Fuel Beds, Tingting Tang

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Wildfires are becoming increasingly erratic nowadays at least in part because of climate change. CFD (computational fluid dynamics)-based models with the potential of simulating extreme behaviors are gaining increasing attention as a means to predict such behavior in order to aid firefighting efforts. This dissertation describes a wildfire model based on the current understanding of wildfire physics. The model includes physics of turbulence, inhomogeneous porous fuel beds, heat release, ignition, and firebrands. A discrete dynamical system for flow in porous media is derived and incorporated into the subgrid-scale model for synthetic-velocity large-eddy simulation (LES), and a general porosity-permeability model is …

Procedural Generation: An Algorithmic Analysis Of Video Game Design And Level Creation, Logan Bond

Honors Theses

Procedural generation is a method for generating mass quantities of data algorithmically rather than manually. One perfect example of this is the recently famous No Man’s Sky, a video game where the entire marketing scheme was structured around its procedurally generated universe. The game’s trailer and advertisements promised its players 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets[1], all of which were procedurally generated. In other words, the developers did not create exclusive profiles for every single planet, but instead programmed the game in such a way that the planets were built from the code. This method of content creation is the …