Software portability

About: Software portability is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8987 publications have been published within this topic receiving 164922 citations. The topic is also known as: portability.

Record linkage strategies: Part II. Portable software and deterministic matching.

Abstract: Software to perform record linkage should have several characteristics: (1) portability in being able to function with researchers' current arrangement of computer systems and languages, (2) flexibility in handling different linkage strategies, and (3) low cost in both computer time and researchers' efforts. A linkage package (LINKS) is described which satisfies these criteria; LINKS provides tools for both deterministic and probabilistic linkage as well as test modules for assessing data quality and structure. Because each linkage project is different, the modular nature of the software allows for better control of the programming process and development of unique strategies. Since the user provides the weights and decision rules, he may modify data between steps and/or develop extra steps to supplement the basic modules. In two information-rich linkage projects involving California AIDS data, LINKS identified mortality using deterministic approaches and permitted comparisons with other software and strategies. Flexible software and a deterministic approach would have eliminated the expensive key entry used to add full names and social security numbers as additional identifiers to one of the California data files.

OpenMP on Networks of Workstations

Abstract: We describe an implementation of a sizable subset of OpenMP on networks of workstations (NOWs). By extending the availability of OpenMP to NOWs, we overcome one of its primary drawbacks compared to MPI, namely lack of portability to environments other than hardware shared memory machines. In order to support OpenMP execution on NOWs, our compiler targets a software distributed shared memory system (DSM) which provides multi-threaded execution and memory consistency. This paper presents two contributions. First, we identify two aspects of the current OpenMP standard that make an implementation on NOWs hard, and suggest simple modifications to the standard that remedy the situation. These problems reflect differences in memory architecture between software and hardware shared memory and the high cost of synchronization on NOWs. Second, we present performance results of a prototype implementation of an OpenMP subset on a NOW, and compare them with hand-coded software DSM and MPI results for the same applications on the same platform. We use five applications (ASCI Sweep3d, NAS 3D- FFT, SPLASH-2 Water, QSORT, and TSP) exhibiting various styles of parallelization, including pipelined execution, data parallelism, coarse-grained parallelism, and task queues. The measurements show little difference between OpenMP and hand-coded software DSM, but both are still lagging behind MPI. Further work will concentrate on compiler optimization to reduce these differences.

Developing distributed applications for integrated product and process design

Abstract: A heterogeneous computing environment characterizes today's manufacturing situation. This is a stumbling block for the efficient implementation of manufacturing concepts such as integrated product and process design (IPPD). A computing environment for IPPD would require the seamless integration of the various product and process design software systems. The exchange of information between these systems should be efficient, compatible and synchronous. This article presents an approach for developing distributed manufacturing applications that are compatible and synchronized and thus, able to support IPPD. The approach involves the use of a common manufacturing application ‘middleware’, which is distributed between a central geometric modelling server and application clients. The portability of the middleware is ensured through the use of Java for code portability and XML for data portability. The compatible product model problem is solved through the use of common data structures developed using reusable application client classes. Efficient transfer of product data is proposed using compressed model information embedded in a product data XML schema. Synchronization of design changes among all applications is achieved through the creation of relationships on an Application Relationship Manager.

Exploring e-Learning Knowledge Through Ontological Memetic Agents

Abstract: E-Learning systems have proven to be fundamental in several areas of tertiary education and in business companies. There are many significant advantages for people who learn online such as convenience, portability, flexibility and costs. However, the remarkable velocity and volatility of modern knowledge due to the exponential growth of the World Wide Web, requires novel learning methods that offer additional features such as information structuring, efficiency, task relevance and personalization. This paper proposes a novel multi-agent e-Learning system empowered with (ontological) knowledge representation and memetic computing to efficiently manage complex and unstructured information that characterize e-Learning. In particular, differing from other similar approaches, our proposal uses (1) ontologies to provide a suitable method for modeling knowledge about learning content and activities, and (2) memetic agents as intelligent explorers in order to create ?in time? and personalized e-Learning experiences that satisfy learners' specific preferences. The proposed method has been tested by realizing a multi-agent software plug-in for an industrial e-Learning platform with experimentations to validate our memetic proposal in terms of flexibility, efficiency and interoperability.

Energy-efficient graphical user interface design

Abstract: Mobile computers, such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), have dramatically increased in sophistication. At the same time, the desire of consumers for portability limits batters size. As a result, many researchers have targeted hardware and software energy optimization. However, most of these techniques focus on compute-intensive applications rather than interactive applications, which are dominant in mobile computers. These systems frequently use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to handle human-computer interaction. This paper is the first to explore how GUIs can be designed to improve system energy efficiency. We investigate how GUI design approaches should be changed to improve system. Energy efficiency and provide specific suggestions to mobile computer designers to enable them to develop more energy-efficient systems. We demonstrate that energy-efficient GUI (E/sup 2/GUI) design techniques can improve the average system energy of three benchmarks (text-viewer, personnel viewer, and calculator) by 26.9, 45.2, and 16.4 percent, respectively. Average performance is simultaneously improved by 23.7, 34.6, and 19.3 percent, respectively.