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.

Sponge: portable stream programming on graphics engines

Abstract: Graphics processing units (GPUs) provide a low cost platform for accelerating high performance computations. The introduction of new programming languages, such as CUDA and OpenCL, makes GPU programming attractive to a wide variety of programmers. However, programming GPUs is still a cumbersome task for two primary reasons: tedious performance optimizations and lack of portability. First, optimizing an algorithm for a specific GPU is a time-consuming task that requires a thorough understanding of both the algorithm and the underlying hardware. Unoptimized CUDA programs typically only achieve a small fraction of the peak GPU performance. Second, GPU code lacks efficient portability as code written for one GPU can be inefficient when executed on another. Moving code from one GPU to another while maintaining the desired performance is a non-trivial task often requiring significant modifications to account for the hardware differences. In this work, we propose Sponge, a compilation framework for GPUs using synchronous data flow streaming languages. Sponge is capable of performing a wide variety of optimizations to generate efficient code for graphics engines. Sponge alleviates the problems associated with current GPU programming methods by providing portability across different generations of GPUs and CPUs, and a better abstraction of the hardware details, such as the memory hierarchy and threading model. Using streaming, we provide a write-once software paradigm and rely on the compiler to automatically create optimized CUDA code for a wide variety of GPU targets. Sponge's compiler optimizations improve the performance of the baseline CUDA implementations by an average of 3.2x.

Method and apparatus for supporting short message services in a wireless number portability environment

Abstract: In a Wireless Number Portability (WNP) environment, a scheme is provided for routing and delivering Short Message Service (SMS) messages. In a WNP environment, the mobile identification number (MIN) and mobile directory number (MDN) will become independent, and the existing method of routing SMS messages will be inadequate to provide SMS to subscribers that port from one service provider to another. Methods and systems for delivering SMS messages to ported subscribers are provided.

Secure Virtual Machine Execution under an Untrusted Management OS

Abstract: Virtualization is a rapidly evolving technology that can be used to provide a range of benefits to computing systems, including improved resource utilization, software portability, and reliability. For security-critical applications, it is highly desirable to have a small trusted computing base (TCB), since it minimizes the surface of attacks that could jeopardize the security of the entire system. In traditional virtualization architectures, the TCB for an application includes not only the hardware and the virtual machine monitor (VMM), but also the whole management operating system (OS) that contains the device drivers and virtual machine (VM) management functionality. For many applications, it is not acceptable to trust this management OS, due to its large code base and abundance of vulnerabilities. In this paper, we address the problem of providing a secure execution environment on a virtualized computing platform under the assumption of an untrusted management OS. We propose a secure virtualization architecture that provides a secure run-time environment, network interface, and secondary storage for a guest VM. The proposed architecture significantly reduces the TCB of security-critical guest VMs, leading to improved security in an untrusted management environment. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed approach using the Xen virtualization system, and demonstrated how it can be used to facilitate secure remote computing services. We evaluate the performance penalties incurred by the proposed architecture, and demonstrate that the penalties are minimal.

A survey and comparison of commercial and open-source robotic simulator software

Abstract: Simulators play an important role in robotics research as tools for testing the efficiency, safety, and robustness of new algorithms. This is of particular importance in scenarios that require robots to closely interact with humans, e.g., in medical robotics, and in assistive environments. Despite the increasing number of commercial and open-source robotic simulation tools, to the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive up-to-date survey paper has reviewed and compared their features. This survey paper presents a comprehensive and detailed overview and a comparison between the most recent and popular commercial and open-source robotic software for simulation and interfacing with real robots. A case-study is presented, showing the versatility in porting the control code from a simulation to a real robot. Finally, a detailed step-by-step documentation on software installation and usage has been made available publicly on the Internet, together with downloadable code examples.

Controllability and observability in distributed testing

Abstract: In developing distributed systems, current trends are towards creating open distributed environments supporting interworking, interoperability, and portability, in spite of heterogeneity and autonomy of related systems. Several reference models, architectures and frameworks such as ODP, CORBA, and TINA, have already been designed and proposed. However, even though models, architectures, and frameworks, provide a good basis for developing working open distributed applications, conformance testing approaches are required for gaining confidence in final products and guaranteeing their integration and interoperability within open distributed environment. ODP provides some preliminary statements on conformance assessment in open distributed systems, but considerable work needs to be done before reaching a workable and accepted conformance testing methodology for open distributed processing. Further, ISO, ITU, OMG, and TINA-C, have recently recognized the urgent need for conformance testing. In this paper, we examine ideas gained from our experience with protocol testing, which may contribute to the design of such a framework. Our methodology is essentially guided by two features that have a great influence on all aspects of the testing process: controllability and observability.