Complex Software Development Environment
Development of complex application software remains a difficult problem
despite recent advances.
The goal of this project is to support rapid software development
through extensible and scalable development environment with mechanisms
for specifying behavior abstraction and composition,
automated verification tools
and support for incremental and modular development.
We define a declarative specification language for developing
complex distributed application.
The language provides mechanisms for abstracting behavior of
software components and composing large number of components hierarchically.
This scalable approach enables software designer to build
large complex software.
Each component defines a limited scope in which behavior of groups
of lower-level components may be independently analyzed and controlled.
The language allows important properties about the behavior
of the applications to be extracted and analyzed.
Tools were developed for analyzing application
behavior to detect synchronization problems, such as deadlock, livelock,
and starvation.
The runtime system dynamically manages incorporation of
modification in the application.
Global state consistency of the concurrent tasks
is preserved automatically by the system
when some task software are modified.
Several techniques have been developed for verifying specification
behaviors.
However, we design a uniform framework useful for specifying
abstraction and composition of component behavior hierarchically
that can be easily exploited in our algorithms for
detecting specification and synchronization problems as well as
detecting dependencies for maintaining global consistencies
when modification to programs are installed at runtime.
Our techniques do not require software designers to specify the
properties of the problem using formalisms such as temporal logic.
We develop the uniform formalism for specifying behavior of complex
systems that may describe the partial order concurrent behavior
and lends itself to analysis.
We also design methods for analyze the system using this formalism
and develop common set of tools that use these methods.
The architecture of the development environment permits
large-scale complex distributed applications to be developed
incrementally while they are in active use.
Programming and runtime environments should allow software designers
to make these changes easily and efficiently.
This must be provided within the appropriate
framework for modeling, analysis and correct execution that is
essential for complex applications.
The key to supporting reconfiguration of large-scale applications
is providing efficient abstraction and composition mechanisms.
By separating specification of well-defined components
from the component interaction and composition behavior,
we allow designers to implement easily replaceable components
and changeable interaction behavior.
The abstraction mechanism simplifies development of large-scale
reconfigurable applications by hiding implementation details.
The facility also include automatic analytical tools for
checking consistency, reachability and dependency
in the behavior of interacting components.
These tools are essential for development and runtime support
of large-scale and reconfigurable decentralized applications.
The method for detecting and notifying failure was implemented.
Another algorithm was developed for computing the recovery path for
the failure detected.
We have designed useful and scalable mechanisms for specifying abstraction
and composition of distributed programs that interact in complex ways.
We have developed algorithms for checking the correctness of
complex applications specifications and
detecting various synchronization problems,
such as deadlock, starvation and livelock.
We have developed a uniform framework for preventing synchronization
problem dynamically and maintaining global consistency
during failure recovery and reconfiguration.
Publications
-
"Advanced Techniques for
Maintaining Reliability of Complex Computer Systems"
by Alvin
Lim, 30th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii,
Jan 1997.
-
"Abstraction and Composition
Techniques for Reconfiguration of Large-Scale Complex Applications"
FONT>
by Alvin
Lim, IEEE International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems,
Annapolis, Maryland, May 1996.
-
"Automatic Analytical Tools
for Reliability and Dynamic Adaptation of Complex Distributed Systems"
by Alvin
Lim, IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer
Systems, Florida, November 6-10, 1995.
-
"A Uniform Software Architecture
for Cooperation, Reliability and Reconfiguration of Autonomous Decentralized
Systems"
by Alvin
Lim, Second International Symposium on Decentralized Systems, IEEE,
Phoenix, Arizona, April 25-27, 1995.
Acknowledgements
-
National
Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. PI on Operating System Support
and Programming Environment for Evolutionary Parallel and Distributed Applications,
May 95 -- April 98.
-
ACEIS.
Co-PI of award from the Army Research Laboratory
(95-98) and Army research Office (92-95) for
the Army Center of Excellence in Information Sciences, July 1992 -- June
1998, with Nazir Warsi (PI), et. al.