Experimental Software Systems: Software Foundations for Experiment Management

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

9870684Miller, Barton P.Livny, MironUniversity of Wisconsin-MadisonExperimental Software Systems: Software Fondations for Experiment ManagementThe development of a high-performance parallel and networked system is an evolutionary process. Systems start with models and simulations and progress through a sequence of implementation steps. At each step, the key question is how and how much did the performance change? This question is important when we are comparing implementation to models or simulations, and when we change an implementation to run with a different algorithm, library, language, number of processors, type of network, input, work load, or scheduling algorithm. This project is developing an Experiment Management facility, called X-Man, to provide an infrastructure to directly attack these issues. This infrastructure will be of immediate use by system developers, and those developing models and simulation environments. It will provide a point of exchange, comparison, and reference for cooperating development groups, supporting collaborative, geographically distributed development. The benefits from X-Man include: (1) Directly support the code development process, providing programmers with concrete understanding of program evolution. (2) Change benchmarking from an ad- hoc activity to one with a quantitative, well-defined structure. (3) Provide both infrastructure and analysis to support model and simulation validation. (4) A framework to evaluate the effect of dynamic systems, analyzing behavioral differences caused by adaptive algorithms.