Significant Events FY 95

• The Composable Systems Project developed and demonstrated several prototype software tools this year, including Aesop, Unicon, Venari/ML, and ChopShop.

• The Aesop software architecture development system was demonstrated at 17th Conf. on Software Engineering (ICSE).

• An initial prototype of Unicon, a system for defining heterogeneous architectures, was installed at UniSys for evaluation and experimentation. UniSys experimented with writing architectural descriptions of the cruise control problem defined in paper "Candidate Model Problems in Software Architecture" by M.Shaw, D.Garlan, R.Allen, D.Klein, J.Ockerbloom, C. Scott, and M.Schumacher.

• A detailed performance evaluation of Venari/ML transactional system shows that their new concurrent garbage collection algorithm gives comparable or better performance than C's explicit memory management or competing automatic garbage collection algorithms.

• ChopShop differs from other program-slicing tools in many ways. It handles full ANSI C, programs that are 100 times larger (30,000 lines instead of just 300), and does a modular analysis over the entire program instead of just analysis of individual procedures. ChopShop provides more accurate results than competing systems and displays results in both textual and pictorial form.

Last modified: July 7, 1995