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.

Performance Engineering for Microservices: Research Challenges and Directions

Abstract: Microservices complement approaches like DevOps and continuous delivery in terms of software architecture. Along with this architectural style, several important deployment technologies, such as container-based virtualization and container orchestration solutions, have emerged. These technologies allow to efficiently exploit cloud platforms, providing a high degree of scalability, availability, and portability for microservices.Despite the obvious importance of a sufficient level of performance, there is still a lack of performance engineering approaches explicitly taking into account the particularities of microservices. In this paper, we argue why new solutions to performance engineering for microservices are needed. Furthermore, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions with regard to performance-aware testing, monitoring, and modeling of microservices.

Map-reduce as a Programming Model for Custom Computing Machines

Abstract: The map-reduce model requires users to express their problem in terms of a map function that processes single records in a stream, and a reduce function that merges all mapped outputs to produce a final result. By exposing structural similarity in this way, a number of key issues associated with the design of custom computing machines including parallelisation; design complexity; software-hardware partitioning; hardware-dependency, portability and scalability can be easily addressed. We present an implementation of a map-reduce library supporting parallel field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). Parallelisation due to pipelining, multiple data paths and concurrent execution of FPGA/GPU hardware is automatically achieved. Users first specify the map and reduce steps for the problem in ANSI Cand no knowledge of the underlying hardware or parallelisation is needed. The source code is then manually translated into a pipelined data path which, along with the map-reduce library, is compiled into appropriate binary configurations for the processing units. We describe our experience in developing a number of benchmark problems in signal processing, Monte Carlo simulation and scientific computing as well as report on the performance of FPGA, GPU and heterogeneous systems.

Autotuning in High-Performance Computing Applications

Abstract: Autotuning refers to the automatic generation of a search space of possible implementations of a computation that are evaluated through models and/or empirical measurement to identify the most desirable implementation. Autotuning has the potential to dramatically improve the performance portability of petascale and exascale applications. To date, autotuning has been used primarily in high-performance applications through tunable libraries or previously tuned application code that is integrated directly into the application. This paper draws on the authors’ extensive experience applying autotuning to high-performance applications, describing both successes and future challenges. If autotuning is to be widely used in the HPC community, researchers must address the software engineering challenges, manage configuration overheads, and continue to demonstrate significant performance gains and portability across architectures. In particular, tools that configure the application must be integrated into the application build process so that tuning can be reapplied as the application and target architectures evolve.

Remote I/O: fast access to distant storage

Abstract: As high-speed networks make it easier to use distributed resources, it becomes increasingly common that applications and their data are not colocated. Users have traditionally addressed this problem by manually staging data to and from remote computers. We argue instead for a new remote I/O paradigm in which programs use familiar parallel I/O interfaces to access remote file systems. In addition to simplifying remote execution, remote I/O can improve performance relative to staging by overlapping computation and data transfer or by reducing communication requirements. However, remote I/O also introduces new technical challenges in the areas of portability, performance, and integration with distributed computing systems. We propose techniques designed to address these challenges and describe a remote I/O library called RIO that we have developed to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques. RIO addresses issues of portability by adopting the quasi-standard MPI-IO interface and by defining a RIO device and RIO server within the ADIO abstract I/O device architecture. It addresses performance issues by providing traditional I/O optimizations such as asynchronous operations and through implementation techniques such as buffering and message forwarding to off load communication overheads. RIO uses the Nexus communication library to obtain access to configuration and security mechanisms provided by the Globus wide area computing tool kit. Microbenchmarks and application experiments demonstrate that our techniques achieve acceptable performance in most situations and can improve turnaround time relative to staging.

Computer aided modeling, analysis and design of control systems - A perspective

Abstract: The paper summarizes experiences of development and use of interactive software for computer aided design of control systems. Different principles for interaction with users having wide ranges of experiences and knowledge are discussed. A comprehensive set of packages for modeling, identification, analysis, simulation, and design are described. Problems associated with structuring, portability, maintainability and extensibility are discussed. Experiences from development and use of the packages in teaching and industrial environments are discussed. Some views on future development of CAD for control systems are also given.