Software reuse in parallel programming environments
To date, reuse of software has not had its anticipated effect on improvements in software productivity. This is because the concepts behind reusability are not fully understood and because there has been relatively little experimentation with reusability systems. In this research the author attacks these problems in three ways: (1) an investigation of the conceptual foundations of reuse for a parallel programming environment based on the Unified Computation Graph Model designed by Dr. James C. Browne at the University of Texas, Austin; (2) a realization of these concepts in a software base management system, ROPE, to support reuse in such an environment; (3) an experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of ROPE. The research addresses each of the fundamental steps of finding, understanding, modifying, and composing reusable components: (1) the problem of finding components is addressed by a new classification method, called the structured relational classification method; (2) for understanding components, the author has introduced design analysis methods which basically flow from the UCGM model itself; (3) modifying components is addressed in several ways. First through a suitable definition of generic designs and secondly through techniques for composing and decomposing graphs; (4) composition of components is discussed in detail and a framework is laid for a calculus of composition of components. The reusability system ROPE was built, tested and used by a variety of people. Each of the concepts discussed above was realized to some degree in the final system though the theory outstripped the implementation in several areas. This was a very substantial programming project. A fairly extensive evaluation of ROPE was done. The initial set of experiments has clearly established the effectiveness of CODE and ROPE in promoting component reuse in programs of modest size and complexity and in delivery of nearly error-free programs with relatively little effort.
- Research Organization:
- Texas Univ., Austin, TX (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 5521639
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: Thesis (Ph.D)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Mercury: An Example of Effective Software Reuse for Metadata Management, Data Discovery and Access
Scoreboard