CAREER: Automatic Retargeting of Network Server Applications

高性能的网络服务器软件已经成为许多用户与计算机进行日常交互的核心，随着更多的服务变得以网络为中心，它的重要性将会增加。 尽管商业和学术界对网络服务器有广泛的兴趣，但开发和维护该软件的过程仍处于起步阶段。 潜在的困难是服务（完成什么）与特定的实现（如何完成）的模糊不清。这项研究的重点是自动化软件基础设施的开发和维护，使程序员能够将注意力集中在服务器的核心功能上。 该方法通过源到源转换使用网络应用程序的半自动并行化。 这种方法非常适合于网络服务器软件领域，因为通常使用通用的设计模式和行为，在特定领域的方式利用。从根本上说，这项研究主张完全分离的服务器的行为模型从其底层的软件体系结构。 允许程序员以高层次的方式指定软件的行为描述，使开发人员不必担心硬件细节和操作系统接口。 这种解耦为服务器开发人员带来了好处，并将刺激并行化技术、操作系统接口和软件架构方面的新研究。

High-performance network server software is already central to many users' day-to-day interaction with computers, and its importance will increase as more services become networkcentric. Despite widespread commercial and academic interest in network servers, the process of developing and maintaining this software remains in its infancy. The underlying difficulty is the blurring of the service (what gets done) with particular implementations (how it gets done).This research focuses on automating the development and maintenance of the software's infrastructure, allowing programmers to focus their attention on the server's core functions. The approach uses semi-automatic parallelization of network applications via source-to-source transformation. This approach is well suited to the network server software domain, since common design patterns and behavior exploitable in a domain-specific manner are often used.Fundamentally, this research advocates completely separating the server's behavioral model from its underlying software architecture. Allowing programmers to specify the behavioral description of the software in a high-level manner frees developers from worrying about hardware details and operating system interfaces. This decoupling provides benefits for server developers, and will spur new research in parallelization techniques, operating system interfaces, and software architectures.