Application software

About: Application software is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 12185 publications have been published within this topic receiving 219822 citations. The topic is also known as: software application & application software.

CSIM18—the simulation engine

Abstract: A simulation engine is the collection of components, features and support functions which are crucial to the implementation of an efficient discrete event simulation model. Furthermore, this model can be embedded in a larger application. A good simulation engine combines efficiency, functionality and completeness to enable a model builder to construct a comprehensive, customized model of either a specific system or a class of systems. This paper presents CSIM18, a simulation engine which supports development of applications with efficient, em bedded simulation models on a variety of system plat forms.

Executing a multicomponent software application on a virtualized computer platform

Abstract: A virtualized computer platform is established and maintained by virtualization software on one or more physical computers. A multicomponent software application may execute on the virtualized computer platform, with different components of the application executing in different virtual machines, which are supported by the virtualization software. The virtualization software may also provide the provision of one or more services that may be beneficial to the operation of the multicomponent software application, such as automated provisioning, resource allocation, VM distribution, performance monitoring, resource management, high availability, backup, disaster recovery, alarms, security, etc. In some embodiments of the invention, some of these services are provided through coordinated efforts of a system resource manager, a VM manager, an application monitor and an application resource manager. In some of these embodiments, an application monitor and an application manager may be included with a multicomponent software application in a single installation package.

Using off-the-shelf middleware to implement connectors in distributed software architectures

Abstract: Software architectures promote development focused on modular building blocks and their interconnections. Since architecture-level components often contain complex functionality, it is reasonable to expect that their interactions will also be complex. Modeling and implementing software connectors thus becomes a key aspect of architecture-based development. Software interconnection and middleware technologies such as RMI, CORBA, ILU, and ActiveX provide a valuable service in building applications from components. The relation of such services to software connectors in the context of software architectures, however, is not well understood. To understand the tradeoffs among these technologies with respect to architectures, we have evaluated several off-the-shelf middleware technologies and identified key techniques for utilizing them in implementing software connectors. Our platform for investigation was C2, a component- and message-based architectural style. By encapsulating middleware functionality within software connectors, we have coupled C2's existing benefits such as component interchangeability, substrate independence and structural guidance with new capabilities of multi-lingual, multi-process and distributed application development in a manner that is transparent to architects.

A statistical multiprocessor cache model

Abstract: The introduction of general-purpose microprocessors running multiple threads will put a focus on methods and tools helping a programmer to write efficient parallel applications. Such a tool should be fast enough to meet a software developer's need for short turn-around time, but also be accurate and flexible enough to provide trend-correct and intuitive feedback. This paper presents a novel sample-based method for analyzing the data locality of a multithreaded application. Very sparse data is collected during a single execution of the studied application. The architectural-independent information collected during the execution is fed to a mathematical memory-system model for predicting the cache miss ratio. The sparse data can be used to characterize the application's data locality with respect to almost any possible memory system, such as complicated multiprocessor multilevel cache hierarchies. Any combination of cache size, cache-line size and degree of sharing can be modeled. Each modeled design point takes only a fraction of a second to evaluate, even though the application from which the sampled data was collected may have executed for hours. This makes the tool not just usable for software developers, but also for hardware developers who need to evaluate a huge memory-system design space. The accuracy of the method is evaluated using a large number of commercial and technical multi-threaded applications. The result produced by the algorithm is shown to be consistent with results from a traditional (and much slower) architecture simulation.

Energy-optimal software partitioning in heterogeneous multiprocessor embedded systems

Abstract: Embedded systems with heterogeneous processors extend the energy/timing trade-off flexibility and provide the opportunity to fine tune resource utilization for particular applications. In this paper, we present a resource model that considers the time and energy costs of run-time mode switching, which considerably improves the accuracy of existing models. Given an application, the software partitioning problem then becomes an optimization over energy cost given deadline constraints, which can be formulate as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. We apply the resource modeling and software partitioning techniques to a multi- module embedded sensing device, the mPlatform, and present a case study of configuring the platform for a real-time sound source localization application on a stack of MSP430 and ARM7 processor based sensing and processing boards.