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.

Harmony: an execution model and runtime for heterogeneous many core systems

Abstract: The emergence of heterogeneous many core architectures presents a unique opportunity for delivering order of magnitude performance increases to high performance applications by matching certain classes of algorithms to specifically tailored architectures. Their ubiquitous adoption, however, has been limited by a lack of programming models and management frameworks designed to reduce the high degree of complexity of software development intrinsic to heterogeneous architectures. This paper proposes Harmony, a runtime supported programming and execution model that provides: (1) semantics for simplifying parallelism management, (2) dynamic scheduling of compute intensive kernels to heterogeneous processor resources, and (3) online monitoring driven performance optimization for heterogeneous many core systems. We are particulably concerned with simplifying development and ensuring binary portability and scalability across system configurations and sizes. Initial results from ongoing development demonstrate the binary compatibility with variable number of cores, as well as dynamic adaptation of schedules to data sets. We present preliminary results of key features for some benchmark applications.

Access and portability of user profiles stored as templates

Abstract: A system to access one or more user profiles that govern one or more vehicle functions. The system cooperates with a processor and verification module which are adapted to verify, using one or more of biometric information, gesture recognition, facial recognition and device identification information, that a user has authority to access the one or more user profiles, where the one or more profiles are stored in one or more of a vehicle, a cloud and a communications device. An edit module is further provided and adapted to allow the user to make one or more edits to the one or more user profiles.

Performance characterization of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks in OpenCL

Abstract: Heterogeneous parallel computing platforms, which are composed of different processors (e.g., CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and DSPs), are widening their user base in all computing domains. With this trend, parallel programming models need to achieve portability across different processors as well as high performance with reasonable programming effort. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is an open standard and emerging parallel programming model to write parallel applications for such heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we characterize the performance of an OpenCL implementation of the NAS Parallel Benchmark suite (NPB) on a heterogeneous parallel platform that consists of general-purpose CPUs and a GPU. We believe that understanding the performance characteristics of conventional workloads, such as the NPB, with an emerging programming model (i.e., OpenCL) is important for developers and researchers to adopt the programming model. We also compare the performance of the NPB in OpenCL to that of the OpenMP version. We describe the process of implementing the NPB in OpenCL and optimizations applied in our implementation. Experimental results and analysis show that the OpenCL version has different characteristics from the OpenMP version on multicore CPUs and exhibits different performance characteristics depending on different OpenCL compute devices. The results also indicate that the application needs to be rewritten or re-optimized for better performance on a different compute device although OpenCL provides source-code portability.

A JAVA environment for medical image data analysis: Initial application for brain PET quantitation

Abstract: Analysis software for medical image data tends to be expensive and usable only in a restricted environment. Therefore the aim of the current project was to implement a flexible framework for medical image processing and visualization which is portable among platforms and open to different data formats including DICOM 3.0. The software was designed as a set of tools which encapsulate specialized functionality. The tools are full stand alone applications, but they are also able to present a co-operating environment within which images and other information are communicated in real time. Currently, the emphasis is on quantitative analysis of PET data by kinetic modelling. However, general viewing capabilities are included, and the design is flexible enough that other types of processing can easily be integrated by simply plugging in Java classes. The software is successfully applied to PET data quantitation in clinical research studies and even patient studies. Portability was aimed at by encoding the programs in Java. Experience shows that the implementation of such a complex and computationally demanding Java application is feasible. Although there are major portability issues to consider, configurations can be found on which the software runs stably and at a speed comparable to C code ifjust-in-time compilation is available.

Thoth, a portable real-time operating system

Abstract: Thoth is a real-time operating system which is designed to be portable over a large set of machines. It is currently running on two minicomputers with quite different architectures. Both the system and application programs which use it are written in a high-level language. Because the system is implemented by the same software on different hardware, it has the same interface to user programs. Hence, application programs which use Thoth are highly portable. Thoth encourages structuring programs as networks of communicating processes by providing efficient interprocess communication primitives.