CAREER: Principles and Practices of Program Instumentation

系统的仪表和测量对于理解、调试、调优、改进、测试、验证或使其可靠是至关重要的。这个项目将研究程序仪表化的原理和实践。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，例如表示并行执行的无环或循环图，以及用于跟踪变量访问信息的有限自动机族。计算和分析这种结构的复杂性将被探讨，包括时间、空间、准确性和完整性之间的权衡。仪器的实践以用户可接受的成本实现测量技术，使用在线算法动态地决定做什么以及何时最好完成，并充分利用手头问题的语义。将开发技术，特别是用于调试和编程工具的技术，以解决由于仪器成本而无法使用的最著名的解决方案。还将开发一套可用于许多领域的实用技术库，所有这些技术都以理论基础为基础。这项研究将导致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加独立的研究研讨会，以及部分指定的小型研究问题（这些问题的制定和解决需要同样多的工作）的“项目集”，来引导他们进行研究。这个项目将提升布朗大学的本科生拓展工作。这个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.***