Test oracles differentiate between the correct and incorrect system behavior. Automation of test oracles for visual output systems mainly involves image comparison, where a snapshot of the output is compared with respect to a reference image. Hereby, the captured snapshot can be subject to variations such as scaling and shifting. These variations lead to incorrect evaluations. Existing approaches employ computer vision techniques to address a specific set of variations. In this article, we introduce ADVISOR, an adjustable framework for test oracle automation of visual output systems. It allows the use of a flexible combination and configuration of computer vision techniques. We evaluated a set of valid configurations with a benchmark dataset collected during the tests of commercial digital TV systems. Some of these configurations achieved up to 3% better overall accuracy with respect to state-of-the-art tools. Further, we observed that there is no configuration that reaches the best accuracy for all types of image variations. We also empirically investigated the impact of significant parameters. One of them is a threshold regarding image matching score that determines the final verdict. This parameter is automatically tuned by offline training. We evaluated runtime performance as well. Results showed that differences among the ADVISOR configurations and state-of-the-art tools are in the order of seconds per image comparison.

Summary Sparse matrix‐vector multiplication (SpMV) is a crucial operation used for solving many engineering and scientific problems. In general, there is no single SpMV method that gives high performance for all sparse matrices. Even though there exist sparse matrix storage formats and SpMV implementations that yield high efficiency for certain matrix structures, using these methods may entail high preprocessing or format conversion costs. In this work, we present a new SpMV implementation, named CSRLenGoto, that can be utilized by preprocessing the Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) format of a matrix. This preprocessing phase is inexpensive enough for the associated cost to be compensated in just a few repetitions of the SpMV operation. CSRLenGoto is based on complete loop unrolling and gives performance improvements in particular for matrices whose mean row length is low. We parallelized our method by integrating it into a state‐of‐the‐art matrix partitioning approach as the kernel operation. We observed up to 2.46× and on the average 1.29× speedup with respect to Intel MKL's SpMV function for matrices with short‐ or medium‐length rows.

Runtime specialization is used for optimizing programs based on partial information available only at runtime. In this paper we apply autotuning on runtime specialization of Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication to predict a best specialization method among several. In 91% to 96% of the predictions, either the best or the second-best method is chosen. Predictions achieve average speedups that are very close to the speedups achievable when only the best methods are used. By using an efficient code generator and a carefully designed set of matrix features, we show the runtime costs can be amortized to bring performance benefits for many real-world cases.

Runtime specialization optimizes programs based on partial information available only at run time. It is applicable when some input data is used repeatedly while other input data varies. This technique has the potential of generating highly efficient codes. In this paper, we explore the potential for obtaining speedups for sparse matrix-dense vector multiplication using runtime specialization, in the case where a single matrix is to be multiplied by many vectors. We experiment with five methods involving runtime specialization, comparing them to methods that do not (including Intel's MKL library). For this work, our focus is the evaluation of the speedups that can be obtained with runtime specialization without considering the overheads of the code generation. Our experiments use 23 matrices from the Matrix Market and Florida collections, and run on five different machines. In 94 of those 115 cases, the specialized code runs faster than any version without specialization. If we only use specialization, the average speedup with respect to Intel's MKL library ranges from 1.44x to 1.77x, depending on the machine. We have also found that the best method depends on the matrix and machine; no method is best for all matrices and machines.

SUMMARY In SOA, composite services depend on a set of partner services to perform their tasks. These partner services may become unavailable because of system and/or network faults, leading to an increased error rate for the composite service. In this paper, we propose an approach to prevent the occurrence of errors that result from the unavailability of partner services. We introduce an external Web service, dubbed Fault Avoidance Service (FAS), to which composite services can register at will. After registration, FAS periodically checks the partner links, detects unavailable partner services, and updates the composite service with available alternatives. Thus, in case of a partner service error, the composite service will have been updated before attempting an ill‐destined request. We provide mathematical analysis regarding the error rate and the false positive rate with respect to the monitoring frequency of FAS for two models. We obtained empirical results by conducting several tests on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to evaluate our mathematical analyses. We also introduce an industrial case study for improving the quality of a service‐oriented system from the broadcasting and content delivery domain. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The appeal of generative programming is "abstraction without guilt": eliminating the vexing trade-off between writing high-level code and highly-performant code. Generative programming also promises to formally capture the domain-specific knowledge and heuristics used by high-performance computing (HPC)experts. How far along are we in fulfilling these promises? To gauge our progress, a recent Shonan Meeting on "bridging the theory of staged programming languages and the practice of high-performance computing" proposed to use a set of benchmarks, dubbed "Shonan Challenge".

Static analysis of multi-staged programs is challenging because the basic assumption of conventional static analysis no longer holds: the program text itself is no longer a fixed static entity, but rather a dynamically constructed value. This article presents a semantic-preserving translation of multi-staged call-by-value programs into unstaged programs and a static analysis framework based on this translation. The translation is semantic-preserving in that every small-step reduction of a multi-staged program is simulated by the evaluation of its unstaged version. Thanks to this translation we can analyze multi-staged programs with existing static analysis techniques that have been developed for conventional unstaged programs: we first apply the unstaging translation, then we apply conventional static analysis to the unstaged version, and finally we cast the analysis results back in terms of the original staged program. Our translation handles staging constructs that have been evolved to be useful in practice (typified in Lisp's quasi-quotation): open code as values, unrestricted operations on references and intentional variable-capturing substitutions. This article omits references for which we refer the reader to our companion technical report.

Program generators are most naturally specified using a quote/antiquote facility; the programmer writes programs with holes which are filled in, at program generation time, by other program fragments. If the programs are generated at compile-time, analysis and compilation follow generation, and no changes in the compiler are needed. However, if program generation is done at run time, compilation and analysis need to be optimized so that they will not overwhelm overall execution time. In this paper, we give a compositional framework for defining program analyses which leads directly to a method of staging these analyses. The staging allows the analysis of incomplete programs to be started at compile time; the residual work to be done at run time may be much less costly than the full analysis. We give frameworks for forward and backward analyses, present several examples of specific analyses, and give timing results showing significant speed-ups for the run-time portion of the analysis relative to the full analysis.