CAREER: Principles and Techniques for Automated Middleware Specializations in Distributed Systems

标准化的通用中间件仍然是开发性能敏感型和安全关键型分布式系统的一个有吸引力的选择，因为它们支持简化分布式计算的常见必需功能。然而，这些中间件和粗粒度设计的功能丰富往往会对应用程序的内存占用和性能产生不利影响。由于高昂的开发和维护成本，对标准化中间件的专有解决方案和手工优化是不可行的。这项研究正在通过通用中间件的自动化专门化来解决这些问题(即，修剪不需要的功能，并添加和定制必要的功能)。这项研究的智能价值在于如何通过以下方式实现自动化专门化：(A)识别和利用中间件的代数结构，以帮助将专门化问题映射为面向功能的软件开发问题；(B)开发跨应用程序生命周期阶段的功能组合、重构和交互的新理论；以及(C)基于生成式编程开发定义良好的专门化过程。这一职业研究的更广泛的影响通过以下方面得到观察：(A)开发新的原则来设计中间件，使其内在地服从专门化；(B)专门化模式的文档，这减少了软件维护；(C)提高了开发人员的生产力和系统的正确性；以及(D)通过称为Gamma(中间件体系结构的操作的生成方面)的开源工具套件，将研究成果过渡到教育和科学社区。

Standardized general-purpose middleware remain an attractive option to develop performance-sensitive and safety-critical distributed systems due to their support for commonly required features that simplify distributed computing. The feature-richness of these middleware and coarse-grained design, however, often adversely impact memory footprint and performance of the applications. Proprietary solutions and handcrafted optimizations to standardized middleware are infeasible due to high development and maintenance costs. This research is addressing these problems via automated specialization of general-purpose middleware (i.e., pruning unwanted features, and adding and customizing the necessary ones). The intellectual merit of this research lies in how the automated specializations are realized by (a) identifying and exploiting the algebraic structure of middleware that helps map the specialization problem into a feature-oriented software development problem; (b) developing a new theory for feature composition, refactoring, and interactions across the lifecycle stages of applications; and (c) developing a well-defined specialization process based on generative programming. The broader impact of this CAREER research is observed through the (a) development of new principles to design middleware that make them inherently amenable to specialization; (b) documentation of specialization patterns, which reduces software maintenance; (c) enhanced developer productivity and system correctness; and (d) transitioning of the research artifacts to education and scientific community through an open source tool suite called GAMMA (Generative Aspects for the Manipulation of Middleware Architectures).