|
|
Seminar
Series: 2007 Schedule
The Software Technology Seminar Series was started in the summer
of 2002 as a way increasing the level of communication and
collaboration between groups within the Software Technology
Laboratory. Below is a list of scheduled meetings. The location
of all meetings (unless otherwise indicated) is Goodwin Hall,
room 524 (Conference Room). If you are interested in giving a presentation or would like to be added the STL talks mailing list please contact
Juergen Dingel.
| Date |
Agenda |
Wednesday,
November 7, 2007,
2:30pm
|
Atef
Mohamed
will tell us about work he has
been doing with Dr.
Zulkernine.
The
title of the presentation will be "Improving
Reliability and Safety by Trading off Software Failure
Criticalities".
Abstract: A number of voters have been proposed
for n-version programming diversity designed software
systems. The knowledge about various software failure
criticalities is not incorporated in the decisions of
these voters.
Moreover, failure classes contradict among each other
with respect to their fault tolerance requirements, as a
result, current voters either consider different
failures equally or they mask only certain types of
failures.
Therefore, the voters need to consider system
criticalities to different failures based on their fault
tolerance requirements trade-off. We propose an approach
for trading off system criticalities to different
failures. In this approach, we introduce two
implementation parameters: the voter constraint hardness
and the number of participants in the voting process. We
use failure criticalities trade-off to determine the
optimal values of these two parameters. This trade-off
enhances the ability of a voter to consider different
failure criticalities. It also decreases the rate of
performance failures. We provide an analysis for the
relationships between the implementation parameters and
the failure occurrence rate of each failure class. We
derive system reliability and safety based on our
approach, and we show gains in both of them. The
proposed approach can be used to build fault tolerant
systems based on n-version programming that use any
generic or hybrid voter. |
Tuesday,
October 9, 2007,
1:30pm |
Rebecca Sanders will talk about the
joint work with Diane Kelly at RMC. The
title of the presentation will be "Characterising
Scientific Software Usage and Development Process".
Abstract: Scientific software is used to advance
knowledge in both research and industry, yet there have
been few recent studies on how this software is
developed and used by scientists. Through interviews
with several developers and users of scientific software
in a variety of science and engineering fields, this
qualitative study has analysed common trends and
trade-offs the interviewees face as they develop
software for their own use and/or attempt to adapt
commercial software for research purposes. The selection
of a programming language, how requirements and other
documentation are addressed (and particularly where the
theory itself fits in as part of the software
documentation), how testing is approached, and quality
factor trade-offs in the use of commercial software are
among the subjects that will be discussed. It is hoped
that this study will shed some light on several
development and usage characteristics that both research
and commercial developers can benefit from addressing
and that it will lead to more definitive future
research. |
Information about past STL seminars can still be accessed for
2002, 2003, 2004,
2005,
and 2006.
|
|
