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 lightweight streaming layer for multicore execution

Abstract: As multicore architectures gain widespread use, it becomes increasingly important to be able to harness their additional processing power to achieve higher performance. However, exploiting parallel cores to improve single-program performance is difficult from a programmer's perspective because most existing programming languages dictate a sequential method of execution.Stream programming, which organizes programs by independent filters communicating over explicit data channels, exposes useful types of parallelism that can be exploited. However, there is still the burden of mapping high-level stream programs to specific multicore architectures. The complexities of each architecture's underlying details makes it difficult to schedule the execution of a stream program with high performance.In this paper, we present the specifications for an intermediate layer between the stream program and the target architecture. This multicore streaming layer (MSL) provides a common level of abstraction that facilitates efficient execution of stream programs by making it easier for compilers to manage computation, and by providing automatic orchestration and optimization of communication when appropriate. We implemented a framework for one such instance of the MSL targeted to the Cell processor and the StreamIt language and achieved greater than 88% utilization on all benchmarks with relatively small amounts of code. The framework can also be applied to other architectures and stream programming languages to enhance generality and portability.

Supporting cooperative WWW browsing: a proxy-based approach

Abstract: The paper presents a system for synchronous cooperative browsing that permits users within a workgroup to share information and cooperate toward a common goal. The system implementation is based on a Java proxy, to achieve portability without requiring modification neither to browsers nor to servers. In addition, the paper shows that the implemented system defines a general framework for interactive multi-user WWW applications.

Distributed database access in a corporate environment using Java

Abstract: Most of the Java applets on the Web today are developed primarily for visualization and 3D interactive animation. Serious doubts have been raised about the feasibility of using Java in the domain of enterprise applications. Compared with the conventional CGI-based approach for developing database applications, Java-based approach provides a high degree of flexibility, scalability, portability and robustness. Through the use of HORB, a software tool based on the concept of Object Request Broker, Java client and server objects can be created easily and accessed transparently. A methodology using Java and HORB for developing database applications is proposed, with the objective to establish a robust Web infrastructure in a corporate environment.

Coordination Algorithm for Distributed Testing

Abstract: With the emergence of new models, architectures and middleware such as ODP, TINA and CORBA, for developing open distributed systems, testing technology requires adaptation for use within conformance assessment in such systems. All these frameworks are object-based and aim at creating open distributed environments supporting interworking, interoperability, and portability, in spite of heterogeneity and autonomy of the related systems. In this context, an open distributed system may be viewed as a system providing standardized distributed interfaces for interacting with other systems. Conformance of such a system can be assessed by attaching a related tester at each provided interface. However, many problems of controllability and observability influencing fault detection during the testing process, arise if there is no coordination between the testers. In this paper, we show how to cope with these problems by using test coordination procedures in a distributed testing architecture.

Triton: an intermediate language and compiler for tiled neural network computations

Abstract: The validation and deployment of novel research ideas in the field of Deep Learning is often limited by the availability of efficient compute kernels for certain basic primitives. In particular, operations that cannot leverage existing vendor libraries (e.g., cuBLAS, cuDNN) are at risk of facing poor device utilization unless custom implementations are written by experts – usually at the expense of portability. For this reason, the development of new programming abstractions for specifying custom Deep Learning workloads at a minimal performance cost has become crucial. We present Triton, a language and compiler centered around the concept of tile, i.e., statically shaped multi-dimensional sub-arrays. Our approach revolves around (1) a C-based language and an LLVM-based intermediate representation (IR) for expressing tensor programs in terms of operations on parametric tile variables and (2) a set of novel tile-level optimization passes for compiling these programs into efficient GPU code. We demonstrate how Triton can be used to build portable implementations of matrix multiplication and convolution kernels on par with hand-tuned vendor libraries (cuBLAS / cuDNN), or for efficiently implementing recent research ideas such as shift convolutions.