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.

A directory service for configuring high-performance distributed computations

Abstract: High-performance execution in distributed computing environments often requires careful selection and configuration not only of computers, networks, and other resources but also of the protocols and algorithms used by applications. Selection and configuration in turn require access to accurate, up-to-date information on the structure and state of available resources. Unfortunately no standard mechanism exists for organizing or accessing such information. Consequently different tools and applications adopt ad hoc mechanisms, or they compromise their portability and performance by using default configurations. We propose a Metacomputing Directory Service that provides efficient and scalable access to diverse, dynamic, and distributed information about resource structure and state. We define an extensible data model to represent required information and present a scalable, high-performance, distributed implementation. The data representation and application programming interface are adopted from the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol; the data model and implementation are new. We use the Globus distributed computing toolkit to illustrate how this directory service enables the development of more flexible and efficient distributed computing services and applications.

ViSP for visual servoing: a generic software platform with a wide class of robot control skills

Abstract: ViSP (Visual Servoing Platform), a fully functional modular architecture that allows fast development of visual servoing applications, is described. The platform takes the form of a library which can be divided in three main modules: control processes, canonical vision-based tasks that contain the most classical linkages, and real-time tracking. ViSP software environment features independence with respect to the hardware, simplicity, extendibility, and portability. ViSP also features a large library of elementary tasks with various visual features that can be combined together, an image processing library that allows the tracking of visual cues at video rate, a simulator, an interface with various classical framegrabbers, a virtual 6-DOF robot that allows the simulation of visual servoing experiments, etc. The platform is implemented in C++ under Linux.

Numerical linear algebra on emerging architectures: The PLASMA and MAGMA projects

Abstract: The emergence and continuing use of multi-core architectures and graphics processing units require changes in the existing software and sometimes even a redesign of the established algorithms in order to take advantage of now prevailing parallelism. Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures (PLASMA) and Matrix Algebra on GPU and Multics Architectures (MAGMA) are two projects that aims to achieve high performance and portability across a wide range of multi-core architectures and hybrid systems respectively. We present in this document a comparative study of PLASMA's performance against established linear algebra packages and some preliminary results of MAGMA on hybrid multi-core and GPU systems.

An introduction to Docker for reproducible research, with examples from the R environment

Abstract: As computational work becomes more and more integral to many aspects of scientific research, computational reproducibility has become an issue of increasing importance to computer systems researchers and domain scientists alike. Though computational reproducibility seems more straight forward than replicating physical experiments, the complex and rapidly changing nature of computer environments makes being able to reproduce and extend such work a serious challenge. In this paper, I explore common reasons that code developed for one research project cannot be successfully executed or extended by subsequent researchers. I review current approaches to these issues, including virtual machines and workflow systems, and their limitations. I then examine how the popular emerging technology Docker combines several areas from systems research - such as operating system virtualization, cross-platform portability, modular re-usable elements, versioning, and a `DevOps' philosophy, to address these challenges. I illustrate this with several examples of Docker use with a focus on the R statistical environment.

PlayAnywhere: a compact interactive tabletop projection-vision system

Abstract: We introduce PlayAnywhere, a front-projected computer vision-based interactive table system which uses a new commercially available projection technology to obtain a compact, self-contained form factor. PlayAnywhere's configuration addresses installation, calibration, and portability issues that are typical of most vision-based table systems, and thereby is particularly motivated in consumer applications. PlayAnywhere also makes a number of contributions related to image processing techniques for front-projected vision-based table systems, including a shadow-based touch detection algorithm, a fast, simple visual bar code scheme tailored to projection-vision table systems, the ability to continuously track sheets of paper, and an optical flow-based algorithm for the manipulation of onscreen objects that does not rely on fragile tracking algorithms.