Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Software Metrics And Dashboard, Shilpika Shilpika, George K. Thiruvathukal, Saulo Aguiar, Konstantin Läufer, Nicholas J. Hayward

George K. Thiruvathukal

Software metrics are a critical tool which provide continuous insight to products and processes and help build reliable software in mission critical environments. Using software metrics we can perform calculations that help assess the effectiveness of the underlying software or process. The two types of metrics relevant to our work is complexity metrics and in-process metrics. Complexity metrics tend to focus on intrinsic code properties like code complexity. In-process metrics focus on a higher-level view of software quality, measuring information that can provide insight into the underlying software development process.

Our aim is to develop and evaluate a metrics dashboard …

Innovation Mashups: Academic Rigor Meets Social Networking Buzz, Dejan Milojicic, Martin Arlitt, Dorée Seligmann, George Thiruvathukal, Christian Timmerer

George K. Thiruvathukal

Exploring new options for publishing and content delivery offers an enormous opportunity to improve the state of the art and further modernize academic and professional publications. Traditional organizations such as the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and Usenix have been encountering increasing competition from new ways of rapid publishing and dissemination, including social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+), blogs with enabled commenting, video posting (YouTube), Slashdot, and many other types of media. "Liking" is replacing traditional impact factors, comments left on authors' webpages or blogs are replacing formal reviews, and site visits have more relevance than the number of article …

Software Engineering Need Not Be Difficult, Jeffrey Carver, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

"Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of software at all levels" (the overall premise of the workshop). We argue that true progress depends on embracing the best traditional--and emergent-- practices in software engineering, especially agile practices that intersect with the tradition of software engineering. Software engineering as practiced today is more than the stereotypical monolithic lifecycle processes (e.g. waterfall, spiral, etc.) that historically have impeded progress for small/medium sized development efforts. In addition, the discipline and practice of software engineering includes software quality (with an established tradition of software metrics). Software processes can be …

Filesystems: Addressing The Last-Mile “Problem” In Services-Oriented/Cloud Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software framework that provides a uniform, configurable connector layer for mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between these two types of resources. Such mappings enable programmatic access to a resource, as well as composition of two or more resources, through the local operating system’s standard filesystem application programming interface (API), script-able file-based command-line utilities, and interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports automatic and manual authentication.

As part of this talk, we demonstrate a new filesystem that interfaces to the SketchFab.com service to support 3D model visualization. For …

Introduction To Computer Science In C#, Andrew Harrington, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Drs. Harrington and Thiruvathukal created a living textbook to introduce computer science and programming principles (using the C# language from Microsoft, read C-sharp, as in music) to computer science at Loyola University Chicago (and beyond). This book is a work in progress but has been used since AY 2012 to teach COMP 170 at Loyola University Chicago.

An Object-Oriented Framework For Userland Filesystem Development, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

Userland filesystems (also known as virtual/installable filesystems) represent a promising direction for interfacing the traditional filesystem concept to specific domain instances (e.g. finance, bioinformatics, astronomy, photo sharing services, etc.) One might initially be inclined to think of filesystems as “old school” or “so 1980s” but their use remains an established practice in computational science and in many business domains, owing to the stability of filesystems interfaces and the continued perception of having great overall performance. While the promise of building one’s own userland filesystems is great, the approach has seen little adoption, owing to the complexity of working with low-level …

Gendered Jobs And The New Gender Gap, George K. Thiruvathukal, Jon Ross

George K. Thiruvathukal

This presentation discusses how to address 21st Century employment challenges by dismantling gender-specific barriers to entry. We take an interdisciplinary approach by focusing on areas such as education, public policy, culture, and media (among others).

Using Scala Strategically Across The Undergraduate Curriculum, Mark Lewis, Konstantin Läufer, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Various hybrid-paradigm languages, designed to balance compile-time error detection, conciseness, and performance, have emerged. Scala, e.g., is interoperable with Java and has become an early leader in adoption, especially in the start-up and open-source spaces. Workshop participants experience Scala’s value as a teaching language in the CS curriculum through four lecture-lab modules: In CS1, the read-eval-print loop and simple, uniform syntax aid programming in the small. In CS2, higher-order methods allow concise, efficient manipulation of collections. Advanced topics include domain-specific languages, concurrency, web apps/services, and mobile apps. Laptop recommended with Scala installed.

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses: CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical methods …

Network Technologies Used To Aggregate Environmental Data, Paul Stasiuk, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

The goal of the Loyola Weather Service (lws) project is to design and build a system of functioning environmental monitoring widgets that can intelligently and autonomously control the environment around them based on set thresholds and triggers. The widgets will also have the ability to aggregate their data and easily display this data in various ways: through a user interface in the room that the widget is placed, via a web application, and programmatically via a RESTful web service.

Simplifying Domain Modeling And Memory Management In User-Mode Filesystems With The Nofs Framework, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Transparent access to remote data sets and data arising from web services is a non-trivial challenge to application developers. This early stage work addresses this challenge with NOFS, an object-oriented framework for creating filesystems to support domain specific functionality. While an early stage work, we present a solution to solve the access problem. Our solution greatly simplifies the task of filesystems development by providing the glue code needed between a domain model and the filesystem contract. We demonstrate support for domain models that are larger than physical memory and demonstrate how the concerns of caching can be removed from user-mode …

A Polyglot Approach To Bioinformatics Data Integration: Phylogenetic Analysis Of Hiv-1, Steven Reisman, Catherine Putonti, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

RNA-interference has potential therapeutic use against HIV-1 by targeting highly-functional mRNA sequences that contribute to the virulence of the virus. Empirical work has shown that within cell lines, all of the HIV-1 genes are affected by RNAi-induced gene silencing. While promising, inherent in this treatment is the fact that RNAi sequences must be highly specific. HIV, however, mutates rapidly, leading to the evolution of viral escape mutants. In fact, such strains are under strong selection to include mutations within the targeted region, evading the RNAi therapy and thus increasing the virus’ fitness in the host. Taking a phylogenetic approach, we …

The Education Issue, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

This article is focused on computing education for the 21st Century and how a renewed focus on education is needed to ensure that our discipline remains vibrant and relevant to all students, regardless of whether they are CS majors or not. After all, many graduates end up in a computer science-related job (e.g. information technology, programming, networking/security, etc.) The article specifically focuses on education-related articles that have appeared within the last year or so in the IEEE Computer Society.

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report. A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel touch display, …

Electronic Editing Of Anglo-Saxon Texts, George K. Thiruvathukal, Allen J. Frantzen

George K. Thiruvathukal

Poster presentation/demonstration at the first Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities about editing of Old English texts and the Anglo-Saxon project.

A Model-Driven Approach To Job/Task Composition In Cluster Computing, Yogesh Kanitkar, Konstantin Läufer, Neeraj Mehta, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

In the general area of high-performance computing, object-oriented methods have gone largely unnoticed. In contrast, the Computational Neighborhood (CN), a framework for parallel and distributed computing with a focus on cluster computing, was designed from ground up to be object-oriented. This paper describes how we have successfully used UML in the following model-driven, generative approach to job/task composition in CN. We model CN jobs using activity diagrams in any modeling tool with support for XMI, an XML-based external representation of UML models. We then export the activity diagrams and use our XSLT-based tool to transform the resulting XMI representation to …

Web 2.0 Publishing And Happy 1.0, Computing Now!, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

In this special issue, we take a look at Web 2.0 and publishing and extend a special happy first birthday greeting to Computing Now, the online member engagement initiative of the IEEE Computer Society.

Pdc Modules For Every Level: A Comprehensive Model For Incorporating Pdc Topics Into The Existing Undergraduate Curriculum, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

We propose to give a half-hour presentation on incorporating PDC topics into our existing undergraduate computer science curriculum. We first describe our experience with single-course and cross-curricular undergraduate PDC education since 1997. We then provide details about our proposed model for incorporating PDC topics into our undergraduate curriculum. To this end, we have distilled a set of consistent, regularly offered and required three-week core and advanced PDC modules from our previously offered PDC content.

Novel Architectures And Accelerators, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Computing Now special issue on novel architectures (GPGPU, FPGA, etc.)

Guest Editor's Introduction: Cluster Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

What is cluster computing? In a nutshell, it involves the use of a network of computing resources to provide a comparatively economical package with capabilities once reserved for supercomputers. In this issue, we look at certain applications of cluster computing to problem solving. As the Beowulf project and clustering revolution celebrate more than 10 years in existence, it's interesting to see what remains the same and what has changed. Let's look at a few aspects of the clustering revolution in more detail.

A Novel Application Development Environment For Large-Scale Scientific Computations, Alok Choudhary, Mahmut Kandemir, Wei-Keng Liao, G Memik, S More, X Shen, A Singh, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

A paper describing a novel application development environment for working with large-scale scientific data sets.

A Simulation Of Demand-Driven Dataflow: Translation From Lucid Into Mdc Language, George K. Thiruvathukal, Thomas W. Christopher

George K. Thiruvathukal

Message Driven Computation (MDC) is a model of computation with which they have been experimenting at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The authors aim to prove the viability of MDC in practice for the expression of parallel algorithms and the implementation of functional and dataflow programming languages. In the paper they discuss their implementation of the Lucid programming language in MDC. The discussion presents a subset of Lucid which illustrates the principles of Lucid, Message Driven Computing, and the translation into and the interpretation of dataflow graphs.

Restfs: The Filesystem As A Connector Abstraction For Flexible Resource And Service Composition, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

The broader context for this chapter comprises business scenarios requiring resource and/or service composition, such as (intra-company) enterprise application integration (EAI) and (inter-company) web service orchestration. The resources and services involved vary widely in terms of the protocols they support, which typically fall into remote procedure call (RPC)~\citeBirrell84implementingremote, resource-oriented (HTTP~\citeFielding96hypertexttransfer and WEBDAV~\citewebdav) and message-oriented protocols. By recognizing the similarity between web-based resources and the kind of resources exposed in the form of filesystems in operating systems, we have found it feasible to map the former to the latter using a uniform, configurable connector layer. Once a remote resource has been …

Toward Scalable Parallel Software: An Active Object Model And Library To Support Von Neumann Languages, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Scalable parallel processing has been proposed as the technology scientists and engineers can use today to solve the problems of tomorrow. Many computational Grand Challenge problems require between two and three orders of magnitude than can be provided with the scalable parallel hardware of the early nineteen-nineties. While hardware continues to become more scalable and cheaper, software is not advancing at the same pace and remains a very expensive part of systems development. A great deal of emphasis on software technology to support scalable parallel processing is placed on von Neumann languages. One of two approaches is common: (a) augment …

Java At Middle Age: Enabling Java For Computational Science, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Not long after the Mosaic Web browser appeared and Netscape communications formed, Sun Microsystems launched Java in a way that will be forever known as a marketing success story. All across the US, there were many Java Day events. I still have my t-shirts as proof of having been there.

A Java Graphical User Interface For Large-Scale Scientific Computations In Distributed Systems, X Shen, George K. Thiruvathukal, Wei-Keng Liao, Alok Choudhary, A Singh

George K. Thiruvathukal

Large-scale scientific applications present great challenges to computational scientists in terms of obtaining high performance and in managing large datasets. These applications (most of which are simulations) may employ multiple techniques and resources in a heterogeneously distributed environment. Effective working in such an environment is crucial for modern large-scale simulations. In this paper, we present an integrated Java graphical user interface (IJ-GUI) that provides a control platform for managing complex programs and their large datasets easily. As far as performance is concerned, we present and evaluate our initial implementation of two optimization schemes: data replication and data prediction. Data replication …

Wide-Area Implementation Of The Message Passing Interface, Ian Foster, Jonathan Geisler, William Gropp, Nicholas Karonis, Ewing Lusk, George K. Thiruvathukal, Steven Tuecke

George K. Thiruvathukal

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) can be used as a portable, high-performance programming model for wide-area computing systems. The wide-area environment introduces challenging problems for the MPI implementor, due to the heterogeneity of both the underlying physical infrastructure and the software environment at different sites. In this article, we describe an MPI implementation that incorporates solutions to these problems. This implementation has beenconstructed by extending the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use communicationservices provided by the Nexus communication library and authentication, resource allocation, process creation/management, and information services provided by the I-Soft system (initially) and the Globus metacomputing toolkit …

Gentoo Linux: The Next Generation Of Linux, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

One of the reasons scientific programmers love Linux is its less-is-more philosophy. We can configure it to be anything from a desktop replacement with USB port support to a blade in a large SMP compute engine to a powerful Web server. Although Linux's market penetration in these various sectors remains to be seen, plenty of people are pumping resources into the Linux world. In this article, I?ll explain why Gentoo Linux (www.gentoolinux.org) is a good choice for scientists, and how its structure gives us the flexibility and ease of management we need.

Combining Soa And Bpm Technologies For Cross-System Process Automation, Sebastian Herr, John Shafaee, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal, Guido Wirtz

George K. Thiruvathukal

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges …

Unit Testing Considered Useful, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Läufer, Benjamin Gonzalez

George K. Thiruvathukal

Testing is an important part of application development. Hardware engineers, in particular, have a long established history of testing for the obvious reason that it's awfully hard to rebuild a microprocessor every time a bug pops up in the design stage--not to mention the enormous headaches such bugs generate on the software side.