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.

Deciding what to design: closing a gap in software engineering education

Abstract: Software has jumped "out of the box" - it controls critical systems; it pervades business and commerce; it is embedded in myriad mechanisms; it infuses entertainment, communication, and other activities of everyday life. Designs for these applications are constrained not only by traditional considerations of capability and performance but also by economic, business, market, and policy issues and the context of intended use. The diversity of applications requires adaptability in responding to client needs, and the diversity of clients and contexts requires the ability to discriminate among criteria for success. As a result, software designers must also get out of their boxes: in addition to mastering traditional software development skills, they must understand the contextual issues that discriminate good solutions from merely competent ones. Current software engineering education, however, remains largely "in the box": it neglects the rich fabric of issues that lie between the client's problem and actual software development. At Carnegie Mellon we have addressed this major shortcoming with a course that teaches students to understand both the capabilities required by the client and the constraints imposed by the client's context. This paper presents our view of the engineering character of software engineering, describes the content and organization of our new course, reports on our experience from the first three offerings of our course, and suggests ways to adapt our course for other educational settings.

A quantitative comparison of reconfigurable, tiled, and conventional architectures on bit-level computation

Abstract: General purpose computing architectures are being called on to work on a more diverse application mix every day. This has been fueled by the need for reduced time to market and economies of scale that are the hallmarks of software on general purpose microprocessors. As this application mix expands, application domains such as bit-level computation, which has primarily been the domain of ASICs and FPGAs, and need to be effectively handled by general purpose hardware. Examples of bit-level applications include Ethernet framing, forward error correction encoding/decoding, and efficient state machine implementation. In this work we compare how differing computational structures such as ASICs, FPGAs, tiled architectures, and superscalar microprocessors are able to compete on bit-level communication applications. A quantitative comparison in terms of absolute performance and performance per area is presented. These results show that although modest gains (2-3x) in absolute performance can be achieved when using FPGAs versus tuned microprocessor implementations, it is the significantly larger gains (2-3 orders of magnitude) that can be achieved in performance per area that motivates work on supporting bit-level computation in a general purpose fashion in the future.

Learning system based on metadata framework and indexed, distributed and fragmented content

Abstract: A system and a method are disclosed for an system that includes a computer with a display unit running the client application software with attached plurality of capture devices for recording audio, video and snapshot (video or computer display monitor) content. A computer keyboard or a tablet is used to control the recording or snapshot of the dynamic classroom content. The client computer may be placed in a classroom and is connected via a network (Internet or LAN/WAN) to a server computer for publishing or remotely storing a “primitive” data session. The client software allows the authorized student or instructor to add additional static content, edit the consolidated content and publish the “primitive” or “organized” data session, which results in enhanced, collaborative content development.

System and application software for the Armstrong multiprocessor

Abstract: The authors identify problems with present parallel processing systems, and present Armstrong, a hardware-software system that is designed to address some of the problems discussed. They briefly describe the Armstrong hardware and discuss, in depth, the operating system software, and performance of the system on a real application, namely, and computation of the 2-D discrete Fourier transform of an image. >

Dependence analysis of parallel and distributed programs and its applications

Abstract: This paper surveys the program dependence analysis technique for parallel and/or distributed programs and its applications from the viewpoint of software engineering. We present primary program dependences which may exist in a parallel and/or distributed program, a general approach to define, analyze, and represent these program dependences formally, and applications of an explicit program dependence based representation for parallel and/or distributed programs in various software engineering activities. We also suggest some research problems an this direction.