[pt] Alunos aprendendo programação concorrente muitas vezes têm dificuldades de testar seus programas por conta do não-determinismo presente no escalonamento de threads. Em geral, é difícil testar cenários específicos e mais difícil ainda repetir um determinado cenário para testar mudanças do código. Nesta tese, apresentamos a EventManager: uma ferramenta que criamos para permitir que um usuário instrumente seu programa, marcando eventos no código e especificando sequências de eventos através de uma linguagem de domínio específico (DSL). Esta linguagem restringe o escalonamento das threads para que obedeça as sequências permitidas para estes eventos. Descrevemos a implementação da EventManager para aplicações baseadas em threads POSIX. Investigamos a aplicação da ferramenta em soluções de problemas clássicos de concorrência para averiguar a expressividade da linguagem que criamos. / [en] Students learning concurrent programming often struggle with tests due to the non-deterministic nature of thread scheduling. It is in general hard to test specific scenarios and harder yet to repeat a given scenario for further tests after changes to the code. In this thesis, we present EventManager: a tool we developed that allows the user to instrument their program, marking events in the code and specifying valid event sequences using a domainspecific language. This language restricts thread scheduling to obey allowed sequences for these events. We describe the implementation of EventManager for applications based on POSIX threads. We investigate our tool applied on solutions of classical concurrency problems to verify the expressiveness of the created language.

<div> <div> <div> <p>The performance bottlenecks in modern data-intensive applications have induced database implementors to forsake high-level abstractions and trade-off simplicity and ease of reasoning for performance. Among the first casualties of this trade-off are the well-known ACID guarantees, which simplify the reasoning about concurrent database transactions. ACID semantics have become increasingly obsolete in practice due to serializable isolation – an integral aspect of ACID, being exorbitantly expensive. Databases, including the popular commercial offerings, default to weaker levels of isolation where effects of concurrent transactions are visible to each other. Such weak isolation guarantees, however, are extremely hard to reason about, and have led to serious safety violations in real applications. The problem is further complicated in a distributed setting with asynchronous state replications, where high availability and low latency requirements compel large-scale web applications to embrace weaker forms of consistency (e.g., eventual consistency) besides weak isolation. Given the serious practical implications of safety violations in data-intensive applications, there is a pressing need to extend the state-of-the-art in program verification to reach non- serializable data-intensive applications operating in a weakly-consistent distributed setting. </p> <p>This thesis sets out to do just that. It introduces new language abstractions, program logics, reasoning methods, and automated verification and synthesis techniques that collectively allow programmers to reason about non-serializable data-intensive applications in the same way as their serializable counterparts. The contributions </p> </div> </div> <div> <div> <p>xi </p> </div> </div> </div> <div> <div> <div> <p>made are broadly threefold. Firstly, the thesis introduces a uniform formal model to reason about weakly isolated (non-serializable) transactions on a sequentially consistent (SC) relational database machine. A reasoning method that relates the semantics of weak isolation to the semantics of the database program is presented, and an automation technique, implemented in a tool called ACIDifier is also described. The second contribution of this thesis is a relaxation of the machine model from sequential consistency to a specifiable level of weak consistency, and a generalization of the data model from relational to schema-less or key-value. A specification language to express weak consistency semantics at the machine level is described, and a bounded verification technique, implemented in a tool called Q9 is presented that bridges the gap between consistency specifications and program semantics, thus allowing high-level safety properties to be verified under arbitrary consistency levels. The final contribution of the thesis is a programming model inspired by version control systems that guarantees correct-by-construction <i>replicated data types</i> (RDTs) for building complex distributed applications with arbitrarily-structured replicated state. A technique based on decomposing inductively-defined data types into <i>characteristic relations</i> is presented, which is used to reason about the semantics of the data type under state replication, and eventually derive its correct-by-construction replicated variant automatically. An implementation of the programming model, called Quark, on top of a content-addressable storage is described, and the practicality of the programming model is demonstrated with help of various case studies. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Context-aware pervasive computing has attracted a significant research interest from both academy and industry worldwide. It covers a broad range of applications that support many manufacturing and daily life activities. For instance, industrial robots detect the changes of the working environment in the factory to adapt their operations to the requirements. Automotive control systems may observe other vehicles, detect obstacles, and monitor the essence level or the air quality in order to warn the drivers in case of emergency. Another example is power-aware embedded systems that need to work based on current power/energy availability since power consumption is an important issue. Those kinds of systems can also be considered as smart applications. In practice, successful implementation and deployment of context-aware systems depend on the mechanism to recognize and react to variabilities happening in the environment. In other words, we need a well-defined and efficient adaptation approach so that the systems' behavior can be dynamically customized at runtime. Moreover, concurrency should be exploited to improve the performance and responsiveness of the systems. All those requirements, along with the need for safety, dependability, and reliability pose a big challenge for developers.In this thesis, we propose a novel programming language called INI, which supports both event-based and rule-based programming paradigms and is suitable for building concurrent and context-aware reactive applications. In our language, both events and rules can be defined explicitly, in a stand-alone way or in combination. Events in INI run in parallel (synchronously or asynchronously) in order to handle multiple tasks concurrently and may trigger the actions defined in rules. Besides, events can interact with the execution environment to adjust their behavior if necessary and respond to unpredictable changes. We apply INI in both academic and industrial case studies, namely an object tracking program running on the humanoid robot Nao and a M2M gateway. This demonstrates the soundness of our approach as well as INI's capabilities for constructing context-aware systems. Additionally, since context-aware programs are wide applicable and more complex than regular ones, this poses a higher demand for quality assurance with those kinds of applications. Therefore, we formalize several aspects of INI, including its type system and operational semantics. Furthermore, we develop a tool called INICheck, which can convert a significant subset of INI to Promela, the input modeling language of the model checker SPIN. Hence, SPIN can be applied to verify properties or constraints that need to be satisfied by INI programs. Our tool allows the programmers to have insurance on their code and its behavior.

Membrane computing investigates models of computation inspired by certain features of biological cells, especially features arising because of the presence of membranes. Because of their inherent large-scale parallelism, membrane computing models (called P systems) can be fully exploited only through the use of a parallel computing platform. However, it is an open question whether it is feasible to develop an efficient and useful parallel computing platform for membrane computing applications. Such a computing platform would significantly outperform equivalent sequential computing platforms while still achieving acceptable scalability, flexibility and extensibility. To move closer to an answer to this question, I have investigated a novel approach to the development of a parallel computing platform for membrane computing applications that has the potential to deliver a good balance between performance, flexibility, scalability and extensibility. This approach involves the use of reconfigurable hardware and an intelligent software component that is able to configure the hardware to suit the specific properties of the P system to be executed. As part of my investigations, I have created a prototype computing platform called Reconfig-P based on the proposed development approach. Reconfig-P is the only existing computing platform for membrane computing applications able to support both system-level and region-level parallelism. Using an intelligent hardware source code generator called P Builder, Reconfig-P is able to realise an input P system as a hardware circuit in various ways, depending on which aspects of P systems the user wishes to emphasise at the implementation level. For example, Reconfig-P can realise a P system in a rule-oriented manner or in a region-oriented manner. P Builder provides a unified implementation framework within which the various implementation strategies can be supported. The basic principles of this framework conform to a novel design pattern called Content-Form-Strategy. The framework seamlessly integrates the currently supported implementation approaches, and facilitates the inclusion of additional implementation strategies and additional P system features. Theoretical and empirical results regarding the execution time performance and hardware resource consumption of Reconfig-P suggest that the proposed development approach is a viable means of attaining a good balance between performance, scalability, flexibility and extensibility. Most of the existing computing platforms for membrane computing applications fail to support nondeterministic object distribution, a key aspect of P systems that presents several interesting implementation challenges. I have devised an efficient algorithm for nondeterministic object distribution that is suitable for implementation in hardware. Experimental results suggest that this algorithm could be incorporated into Reconfig-P without too significantly reducing its performance or efficiency. / Thesis (PhDInformationTechnology)--University of South Australia, 2010

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Les applications réactives et sensibles au contexte sont des applications intelligentes qui observent l’environnement (ou contexte) dans lequel elles s’exécutent et qui adaptent, si nécessaire, leur comportement en cas de changements dans ce contexte, ou afin de satisfaire les besoins ou d'anticiper les intentions des utilisateurs. La recherche dans ce domaine suscite un intérêt considérable tant de la part des académiques que des industriels. Les domaines d'applications sont nombreux: robots industriels qui peuvent détecter les changements dans l'environnement de travail de l'usine pour adapter leurs opérations; systèmes de contrôle automobiles pour observer d'autres véhicules, détecter les obstacles, ou surveiller le niveau d'essence ou de la qualité de l'air afin d'avertir les conducteurs en cas d'urgence; systèmes embarqués monitorant la puissance énergétique disponible et modifiant la consommation en conséquence. Dans la pratique, le succès de la mise en œuvre et du déploiement de systèmes sensibles au contexte dépend principalement du mécanisme de reconnaissance et de réaction aux variations de l'environnement. En d'autres termes, il est nécessaire d'avoir une approche adaptative bien définie et efficace de sorte que le comportement des systèmes peut être modifié dynamiquement à l'exécution. En outre, la concurrence devrait être exploitée pour améliorer les performances et la réactivité des systèmes. Tous ces exigences, ainsi que les besoins en sécurité et fiabilité constituent un grand défi pour les développeurs.C’est pour permettre une écriture plus intuitive et directe d'applications réactives et sensibles au contexte que nous avons développé dans cette thèse un nouveau langage appelé INI. Pour observer les changements dans le contexte et y réagir, INI s’appuie sur deux paradigmes : la programmation événementielle et la programmation à base de règles. Événements et règles peuvent être définis en INI de manière indépendante ou en combinaison. En outre, les événements peuvent être reconfigurésdynamiquement au cours de l’exécution. Un autre avantage d’INI est qu’il supporte laconcurrence afin de gérer plusieurs tâches en parallèle et ainsi améliorer les performances et la réactivité des programmes. Nous avons utilisé INI dans deux études de cas : une passerelle M2M multimédia et un programme de suivi d’objet pour le robot humanoïde Nao. Enfin, afin d’augmenter la fiabilité des programmes écrits en INI, un système de typage fort a été développé, et la sémantique opérationnelle d’INI a été entièrement définie. Nous avons en outre développé un outil appelé INICheck qui permet de convertir automatiquement un sous-ensemble d’INI vers Promela pour permettre un analyse par model checking à l’aide de l’interpréteur SPIN. / Context-aware pervasive computing has attracted a significant research interest from both academy and industry worldwide. It covers a broad range of applications that support many manufacturing and daily life activities. For instance, industrial robots detect the changes of the working environment in the factory to adapt their operations to the requirements. Automotive control systems may observe other vehicles, detect obstacles, and monitor the essence level or the air quality in order to warn the drivers in case of emergency. Another example is power-aware embedded systems that need to work based on current power/energy availability since power consumption is an important issue. Those kinds of systems can also be considered as smart applications. In practice, successful implementation and deployment of context-aware systems depend on the mechanism to recognize and react to variabilities happening in the environment. In other words, we need a well-defined and efficient adaptation approach so that the systems' behavior can be dynamically customized at runtime. Moreover, concurrency should be exploited to improve the performance and responsiveness of the systems. All those requirements, along with the need for safety, dependability, and reliability pose a big challenge for developers.In this thesis, we propose a novel programming language called INI, which supports both event-based and rule-based programming paradigms and is suitable for building concurrent and context-aware reactive applications. In our language, both events and rules can be defined explicitly, in a stand-alone way or in combination. Events in INI run in parallel (synchronously or asynchronously) in order to handle multiple tasks concurrently and may trigger the actions defined in rules. Besides, events can interact with the execution environment to adjust their behavior if necessary and respond to unpredictable changes. We apply INI in both academic and industrial case studies, namely an object tracking program running on the humanoid robot Nao and a M2M gateway. This demonstrates the soundness of our approach as well as INI's capabilities for constructing context-aware systems. Additionally, since context-aware programs are wide applicable and more complex than regular ones, this poses a higher demand for quality assurance with those kinds of applications. Therefore, we formalize several aspects of INI, including its type system and operational semantics. Furthermore, we develop a tool called INICheck, which can convert a significant subset of INI to Promela, the input modeling language of the model checker SPIN. Hence, SPIN can be applied to verify properties or constraints that need to be satisfied by INI programs. Our tool allows the programmers to have insurance on their code and its behavior.

Large open-source software projects involve developers with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise. Such software projects furthermore include many internal APIs that developers must understand and use properly. According to the intended purpose of these APIs, they are more or less frequently used, and used by developers with more or less expertise. In this paper, we study the impact of usage patterns and developer expertise on the rate of defects occurring in the use of internal APIs. For this preliminary study, we focus on memory management APIs in the Linux kernel, as the use of these has been shown to be highly error prone in previous work. We study defect rates and developer expertise, to consider e.g., whether widely used APIs are more defect prone because they are used by less experienced developers, or whether defects in widely used APIs are more likely to be fixed.

An important characteristic of Service-Oriented Architectures is that clients do not depend on the service implementation's internal assignment of methods to objects. It is perhaps the most important technical characteristic that differentiates them from more common object-oriented solutions. This characteristic makes clients and services malleable, allowing them to be rearranged at run-time as circumstances change. That improvement in malleability is impaired by requiring clients to direct service requests to particular services. Ideally, the clients are totally oblivious to the service structure, as they are to aspect structure in aspect-oriented software. Removing knowledge of a method implementation's location, whether in object or service, requires re-defining the boundary line between programming language and middleware, making clearer specification of dependence on protocols, and bringing the transaction-like concept of failure scopes into language semantics as well. This paper explores consequences and advantages of a transition from object-request brokering to service-request brokering, including the potential to improve our ability to write more parallel software.

Enforcing security policies to distributed systems is difficult, in particular, when a system contains untrusted components. We designed AspectKE*, a distributed AOP language based on a tuple space, to tackle this issue. In AspectKE*, aspects can enforce access control policies that depend on future behavior of running processes. One of the key language features is the predicates and functions that extract results of static program analysis, which are useful for defining security aspects that have to know about future behavior of a program. AspectKE* also provides a novel variable binding mechanism for pointcuts, so that pointcuts can uniformly specify join points based on both static and dynamic information about the program. Our implementation strategy performs fundamental static analysis at load-time, so as to retain runtime overheads minimal. We implemented a compiler for AspectKE*, and demonstrate usefulness of AspectKE* through a security aspect for a distributed chat system.