Architecture

About: Architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25849 publications have been published within this topic receiving 225266 citations.

Soft architecture machines

Abstract: This book is an offspring of Negroponte's "The Architecture Machine, " published by The MIT Press in 1970. As is usually the case where computer systems are involved, the new generation is several orders of magnitude more powerful than even its remarkably mind-extending parent. The last few years have represented a "passing from an idiom to a reality, following (not necessarily consciously) notions set down in "The Architecture Machine" with an uncanny precision. The prognostications of hardware enumerated in wanton fantasy have been achieved and even superseded in the actual Architecture Machine of 1972."The general assumption of this new book is that the architect is an unnecessary and even detrimental middleman between individual, continuously changing needs and the continuous incorporation of those needs into the built environment. The book proposes a new kind of architecture without architects, and even without surrogate architects.The first chapter sets forth generally what is involved in learning to understand both the makings of intelligence and the making of architecture. It reveals polarities in attitudes toward thinking about thinking, and it appraises techniques--real and potential--that lead to meaningful thought about the process.A more direct analysis of architectural design activities is presented in the second chapter. Its goal is to achieve a closer coupling between man and machine, and it proposes sidestepping the traditional division of labor in which man and machine are assigned tasks that they are supposed to be respectively better at. Instead, a joint venture model is suggested: man and machine are treated as equal partners, even as candid good friends.The third chapter moves beyond the architect--beyond the need for an outside designer's intervention between our needs and their fulfillment. It asserts that each individual can be the best architect for his own needs and does not require a paternalistic human or mechanical architect to dictate his final decisions.The last chapter--furthest out of all--looks toward a distant future not only beyond the architect but beyond architecture as we know it. Here architecture machines are not simply used as aids in the design of buildings--they serve as buildings in themselves. Man will live in living, intelligent machines or cognitive physical environments that can immediately respond to his needs or wishes or whims. The possibilities are unlimited and a challenge to any imagination.

Intelligent Integration of Information

Abstract: This paper describes and classifies methods to transform data to information in a three-layer, mediated architecture. The layers can be characterized from the top down as information-consuming applications, mediators which perform intelligent integration of information (I3), and data, knowledge and simulation resources.The objective of modules in the I3 architecture is to provide end users' apoplications with information obtained through selection, abstraction, fusion, caching, extrapolation, and pruning of data. The data is obtained from many diverse and heterogeneous sources. The I3 objective requires the establishment of a consensual information system architecture, so that many participants and technologies can contribute. An attempt to provide such a range of services within a single, tightly integrated system is unlikely to survive technological or environmental change.This paper focuses on the computational models needed to support the mediating functions in this architecture and introduces initial applicatiions. The architecture has been motivated in [Wied:92C].

Patterns Generate Architectures

Abstract: We need ways to describe designs that communicate the reasons for our design decisions, not just the results. Design patterns have been proposed as ways of communicating design information. This paper shows that patterns can be used to derive an architecture from its problem statement. The resulting description makes it easier to understand the purpose of the various architectural features.

Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence

Abstract: Because a system‘s software architecture strongly influences its quality attributes such as modifiability, performance, and security, it is important to analyze and reason about that architecture. However, architectural documentation frequently does not exist, and when it does, it is often “out of sync” with the implemented system. In addition, it is rare that software development begins with a clean slates systems are almost always constrained by existing legacy code. As a consequence, we need to be able to extract information from existing system implementations and utilize this information for architectural reasoning. This paper presents Dali, an open, lightweight workbench that aids an analyst in extracting, manipulating, and interpreting architectural information. By assisting in the reconstruction of architectures from extracted information, Dali helps an analyst redocument architectures, discover the relationship between “as-implemented” and “as-designed” architectures, analyze architectural quality attributes and plan for architectural change.

An architecture for software-controlled data prefetching

Abstract: for Software-Controlled Alexander C. Klaiber, Henry M. Levy University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 Data Prefet thing* not increased as fast as processor speeds, and the tenThis paper describes an architecture and related compiler support for software-controlled data prefetching, a technique to hide memory latency in high-performance processors. At compile-time, FETCH instructions are inserted into the instruction-stream by the compiler, based on anticipated data references and detailed information about the memory system. At run time, a separate functional unit in the CPU, the fetch unit, interprets these instructions and initiates appropriate memory reads, Prefetched data is kept in a small, fullyassociative cache, called the fetchbufler, to reduce contention with the conventional direct-mapped cache. We also introduce a prewriteback technique that can reduce the impact of stalls due to replacement writebacks in the cache. A detailed hardware model is presented and the required compiler support is developed. Simulations based on a MIPS processor model show that this technique can dramatically reduce on-chip cache miss ratios and average observed memory latency for scientific loops at only slight cost in total memory traffic.