CAREER: Principles and Practices of Program Instumentation

系统的仪器和测量对于理解、调试、调整、改进、测试、验证或使其可靠至关重要。 本专题将探讨程式插装的原理与实务。原理包括对并行，分布式和顺序系统中各种结构的动态测量和观察的理论理解，例如用于表示并行执行的非循环或循环图和用于跟踪变量访问信息的有限自动机家族。将探讨计算和分析这种结构的复杂性，包括时间，空间，准确性和完整性之间的权衡。 仪器化的实践以用户可接受的成本实现测量技术，使用在线算法来动态地决定做什么以及什么时候做得最好，并充分利用手头问题的语义。技术将被开发，特别是调试和编程工具，为问题的最知名的解决方案是目前由于仪器成本过高。还将开发一个可用于许多领域的实用技术库，所有这些技术都以理论为基础。这项研究将使人们更深入地了解解决各种类型的仪器问题的成本以及解决这些问题的一系列技术。 这个项目将通过让本科生参与独立的研究研讨会，以及“项目集”部分指定的小型研究问题，这些问题需要尽可能多的工作来解决问题。该项目将升级布朗大学的本科生外展工作。该项目将产生的工具将适合学生在他们的研究项目中使用。*

The instrumentation and measurement of systems is vital for them to be understood, debugged, tuned, refined, tested, validated, or made reliable. This project will investigate the principles and practice of program instrumentation. Principles include a theoretical understanding of the dynamic measurement and observation of various structures in parallel, distributed, and sequential systems, such as acyclic or cyclic graphs for representing parallel executions and families of finite automata for tracking information about variable accesses. The complexity of computing and analyzing such structures will be explored, including tradeoffs between time, space, accuracy, and completeness. The practice of instrumentation implements measurement techniques at a cost acceptable to users, using on-line algorithms to dynamically decide what to do and when it is best done and by fully exploiting the semantics of the problem at hand. Techniques will be developed, especially for debugging and programming tools, for problems whose best-known solutions are currently prohibitive because of instrumentation costs. An arsenal of practical techniques usable in many areas, all of which are based on theoretical underpinnings, will also be developed. This research will result in a deeper understanding of the cost of solving various types of instrumentation problems and an array of techniques for their solution. This project will introduce undergraduates to research by involving them in independent study seminars together with "project sets" partially specified mini-research problems which require as much work in problem formulation as solution. This project will escalate the undergraduate-outreach effort at Brown. The tools this project will produce will be suitable for use by students in their research projects.***