Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Real-Time Divisible Load Scheduling For Cluster Computing, Xuan Lin, Ying Lu, Jitender S. Deogun, Steve Goddard
Real-Time Divisible Load Scheduling For Cluster Computing, Xuan Lin, Ying Lu, Jitender S. Deogun, Steve Goddard
CSE Technical Reports
Cluster computing has emerged as a new paradigm for solving large-scale problems. To enhance QoS and provide performance guarantees in cluster computing environments, various real-time scheduling algorithms and workload models have been investigated. Computational loads that can be arbitrarily divided into independent pieces represent many real-world applications. Divisible load theory (DLT) provides insight into distribution strategies for such computations. However, the problem of providing performance guarantees to divisible load applications has not yet been systematically studied. This paper investigates such algorithms for a cluster environment. Design parameters that affect the performance of these algorithms and scenarios when the choice of …
Dynamic Characterization Of Web Application Interfaces, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Sebastian Elbaum, Gregg Rothermel
Dynamic Characterization Of Web Application Interfaces, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Sebastian Elbaum, Gregg Rothermel
CSE Technical Reports
Web applications are increasingly prominent in society, serving a wide variety of user needs. Engineers seeking to enhance, test, and maintain these applications and third-party programmers wishing to utilize these applications need to understand their interfaces. In this paper, therefore, we present methodologies for characterizing the interfaces of web applications through a form of dynamic analysis, in which directed requests are sent to the application, and responses are analyzed to draw inferences about its interface. We also provide mechanisms to increase the scalability of the approach. Finally, we evaluate the approach’s performance on six non-trivial web applications.
Parallel Randomized State-Space Search, Matthew B. Dwyer, Sebastian Elbaum, Suzette Person, Rahul Purandare
Parallel Randomized State-Space Search, Matthew B. Dwyer, Sebastian Elbaum, Suzette Person, Rahul Purandare
CSE Technical Reports
Model checkers search the space of possible program behaviors to detect errors and to demonstrate their absence. Despite major advances in reduction and optimization techniques, state-space search can still become cost-prohibitive as program size and complexity increase. In this paper, we present a technique for dramatically improving the cost-effectiveness of state-space search techniques for error detection using parallelism. Our approach can be composed with all of the reduction and optimization techniques we are aware of to amplify their benefits. It was developed based on insights gained from performing a large empirical study of the cost-effectiveness of randomization techniques in state-space …
Adaptive Online Program Analysis: Concepts, Infrastructure, And Applications, Matthew B. Dwyer, Alex Kinneer, Sebastian Elbaum
Adaptive Online Program Analysis: Concepts, Infrastructure, And Applications, Matthew B. Dwyer, Alex Kinneer, Sebastian Elbaum
CSE Technical Reports
Dynamic analysis of state-based properties is being applied to problems such as validation, intrusion detection, and program steering and reconfiguration. Dynamic analysis of such properties, however, is used rarely in practice due to its associated run-time overhead that causes multiple orders of magnitude slowdown of program execution. In this paper, we present an approach for exploiting the state-fullness of specifications to reduce the cost of dynamic program analysis. With our approach, the results of the analysis are guaranteed to be identical to those of the traditional, expensive dynamic analyses, yet with overheads between 23% and 33% relative to the un-instrumented …
Controlling Factors In Evaluating Path-Sensitive Error Detection Techniques, Matthew B. Dwyer, Suzette Person, Sebastian Elbaum
Controlling Factors In Evaluating Path-Sensitive Error Detection Techniques, Matthew B. Dwyer, Suzette Person, Sebastian Elbaum
CSE Technical Reports
Recent advances in static program analysis have made it possible to detect errors in applications that have been thoroughly tested and are in wide-spread use. The ability to find errors that have eluded traditional validation methods is due to the development and combination of sophisticated algorithmic techniques that are embedded in the implementations of analysis tools. Evaluating new analysis techniques is typically performed by running an analysis tool on a collection of subject programs, perhaps enabling and disabling a given technique in different runs. While seemingly sensible, this approach runs the risk of attributing improvements in the cost-effectiveness of the …
Sofya: A Flexible Framework For Development Of Dynamic Program Analyses For Java Software, Alex Kinneer, Matthew B. Dwyer, Gregg Rothermel
Sofya: A Flexible Framework For Development Of Dynamic Program Analyses For Java Software, Alex Kinneer, Matthew B. Dwyer, Gregg Rothermel
CSE Technical Reports
Dynamic analysis techniques are well established in the software engineering community as methods for validating, understanding, maintaining, and improving programs. Generally, this class of techniques requires developers to instrument programs to generate events that capture, or observe, relevant features of program execution. Streams of these events are then processed to achieve the goals of the dynamic analysis. The lack of high-level tools for defining program observations, automating their mapping to efficient low-level implementations, and supporting the flexible combination of different event-stream-based processing components hampers the development and evaluation of new dynamic analysis techniques. For example, mapping non-trivial program observations to …
Carving Differential Unit Test Cases From System Test Cases, Sebastian Elbaum, Hui Nee Chin, Matthew B. Dwyer, Jonathan Dokulil
Carving Differential Unit Test Cases From System Test Cases, Sebastian Elbaum, Hui Nee Chin, Matthew B. Dwyer, Jonathan Dokulil
CSE Technical Reports
Unit test cases are focused and efficient. System tests are effective at exercising complex usage patterns. Differential unit tests (DUT) are a hybrid of unit and system tests. They are generated by carving the system components, while executing a system test case, that influence the behavior of the target unit, and then re-assembling those components so that the unit can be exercised as it was by the system test. We conjecture that DUTs retain some of the advantages of unit tests, can be automatically and inexpensively generated, and have the potential for revealing faults related to intricate system executions. In …
Idf: An Inconsistency Detection Framework – Performance Modeling And Guide To Its Design, Yijun Lu, Xueming Li, Hong Jiang
Idf: An Inconsistency Detection Framework – Performance Modeling And Guide To Its Design, Yijun Lu, Xueming Li, Hong Jiang
CSE Technical Reports
With the increased popularity of replica-based services in distributed systems such as the Grid, consistency control among replicas becomes more and more important. To this end, IDF (Inconsistency Detection Framework), a two-layered overlay-based architecture, has been proposed as a new way to solve this problem—instead of enforcing a predefined protocol, IDF detects inconsistency in a timely manner when it occurs and resolves it based on applications’ semantics.
This paper presents a comprehensive analytical study of IDF to assess its performance and provide insight into its design. More specifically, it develops an analytical model to characterize IDF. Based on this model, …
Eraid: Conserving Energy In High Performance Raid Systems With Conventional Disks, Dong Li, Jun Wang
Eraid: Conserving Energy In High Performance Raid Systems With Conventional Disks, Dong Li, Jun Wang
CSE Technical Reports
Recently energy consumption becomes an ever critical concern for both low-end and high-end storage server and data centers. A majority of existing energy conservation solutions resort to multi-speed disks. However, current server systems are still built with conventional disks.
In this paper, we propose an energy saving policy, eRAID, for conventional disk based RAID-1 systems. eRAID saves energy by spinning down partial or entire mirror disk group with predictable performance degradation. The heart work of eRAID is to develop an accurate dynamic performance control (including disk power management) scheme. To guarantee service quality, the dynamic performance control works for two …
On Reoptimizing Multi-Class Classifiers, Kun Deng, Chris Bourke, Stephen Scott, Robert E. Schapire, N. V. Vinodchandran
On Reoptimizing Multi-Class Classifiers, Kun Deng, Chris Bourke, Stephen Scott, Robert E. Schapire, N. V. Vinodchandran
CSE Technical Reports
Significant changes in the instance distribution or associated cost function of a learning problem require one to reoptimize a previously learned classifier to work under new conditions. We study the problem of reoptimizing a multi-class classifier based on its ROC hypersurface and a matrix describing the costs of each type of prediction error. For a binary classifier, it is straightforward to find an optimal operating point based on its ROC curve and the relative cost of true positive to false positive error. However, the corresponding multi-class problem (finding an optimal operating point based on a ROC hypersurface and cost matrix) …
Automated Generation Of Context-Aware Tests, Zhimin Wang, Sebastian Elbaum, David Rosenblum
Automated Generation Of Context-Aware Tests, Zhimin Wang, Sebastian Elbaum, David Rosenblum
CSE Technical Reports
The incorporation of context-awareness capabilities into pervasive applications allows them to leverage contextual information to provide additional services while maintaining an acceptable quality of service. These added capabilities, however, introduce a distinct input space that can affect the behavior of these applications at any point during their execution, making their validation quite challenging. In this paper, we introduce an approach to improve the test suite of a context-aware application by identifying context-aware program points where context changes may affect the application’s behavior, and by systematically manipulating the context data fed into the application to increase its exposure to potentially valuable …
Web Application Characterization Through Directed Requests, Sebastian Elbaum, Kalyanram Chilakamarri, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Gregg Rothermel
Web Application Characterization Through Directed Requests, Sebastian Elbaum, Kalyanram Chilakamarri, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Gregg Rothermel
CSE Technical Reports
Web applications are increasingly prominent in society, serving a wide variety of user needs. Engineers seeking to enhance, test, and maintain these applications must be able to understand and characterize their interfaces. Third-party programmers (professional or end user) wishing to incorporate the data provided by such services into their own applications would also benefit from such characterization when the target site does not provide adequate programmatic interfaces. In this paper, therefore, we present methodologies for characterizing the interfaces to web applications through a form of dynamic analysis, in which directed requests are sent to the application, and responses are analyzed …
An Ontology-Based Metamodel For Software Patterns, Scott Henninger, Padmapriya Ashokkumar
An Ontology-Based Metamodel For Software Patterns, Scott Henninger, Padmapriya Ashokkumar
CSE Technical Reports
Patterns have been successfully used in software design to reuse proven solutions. But the complex interconnections and the number of pattern collections is becoming a barrier for identifying relevant patterns and pattern combinations for a given design context. More formal representations of patterns are needed that allow machine processing and the creation of systematic pattern languages that guide composition of patterns into coherent design solutions. In this paper, we present a technique based on Description Logic and Semantic Web technologies to address these problems. A metamodel is presented for developing pattern languages using this technology. Usability patterns are used to …
Scaling A Dataflow Testing Methodology To The Multiparadigm World Of Commercial Spreadsheets, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Gregg Rothermel, Tyler Creelan, Margaret Burnett
Scaling A Dataflow Testing Methodology To The Multiparadigm World Of Commercial Spreadsheets, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Gregg Rothermel, Tyler Creelan, Margaret Burnett
CSE Technical Reports
Spreadsheets are widely used but often contain faults. Thus, in prior work we presented a dataflow testing methodology for use with spreadsheets, which studies have shown can be used cost-effectively by end-user programmers. To date, however, the methodology has been investigated across a limited set of spreadsheet language features. Commercial spreadsheet environments are multiparadigm languages, utilizing features not accommodated by our prior approaches. In addition, most spreadsheets contain large numbers of replicated formulas that severely limit the efficiency of dataflow testing approaches. We show how to handle these two issues with a new dataflow adequacy criterion and automated detection of …