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。这个项目将研究程序插装的原理和实践。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，例如用于表示并行执行的无环图或循环图，以及用于跟踪有关变量访问的信息的有限自动机系列。将探讨计算和分析此类结构的复杂性，包括时间、空间、精度和完整性之间的权衡。检测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做得最好，并充分利用手头问题的语义。将开发技术，特别是针对调试和编程工具，以解决目前最知名的解决方案因仪器成本而令人望而却步的问题。还将开发可用于许多领域的实用技术武器库，所有这些技术都以理论基础为基础。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加独立的学习研讨会和“项目集”部分指定的微型研究问题来介绍他们进行研究，这些问题需要同样多的工作来形成问题和解决问题。这个项目将升级布朗大学的本科生外展工作。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.***