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Publications

Publications by HASLab

2021

Ranking programming languages by energy efficiency

Authors
Pereira, R; Couto, M; Ribeiro, F; Rua, R; Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Saraiva, J;

Publication
SCIENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

Abstract
This paper compares a large set of programming languages regarding their efficiency, including from an energetic point-of-view. Indeed, we seek to establish and analyze different rankings for programming languages based on their energy efficiency. The goal of being able to rank programming languages based on their energy efficiency is both recent, and certainly deserves further studies. We have taken rigorous and strict solutions to 10 well defined programming problems, expressed in (up to) 27 programming languages, from the well known Computer Language Benchmark Game repository. This repository aims to compare programming languages based on a strict set of implementation rules and configurations for each benchmarking problem. We have also built a framework to automatically, and systematically, run, measure and compare the energy, time, and memory efficiency of such solutions. Ultimately, it is based on such comparisons that we propose a series of efficiency rankings, based on single and multiple criteria. Our results show interesting findings, such as how slower/faster languages can consume less/more energy, and how memory usage influences energy consumption. We also present a simple way to use our results to provide software engineers and practitioners support in deciding which language to use when energy efficiency is a concern. In addition, we further validate our results and rankings against implementations from a chrestomathy program repository, Rosetta Code., by reproducing our methodology and benchmarking system. This allows us to understand how the results and conclusions from our rigorously and well defined benchmarked programs compare to those based on more representative and real-world implementations. Indeed our results show that the rankings do not change apart from one programming language.

2021

Bringing Green Software to Computer Science Curriculum: Perspectives from Researchers and Educators

Authors
Saraiva, J; Zong, Z; Pereira, R;

Publication
ITiCSE 2021: 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Virtual Event, Germany, June 26 - July 1, 2021.

Abstract
Only recently has the software engineering community started conducting research on developing energy efficient software, or green software. This is shadowed when compared to the research already produced in the computer hardware community. While research in green software is rapidly increasing, several recent studies with software engineers show that they still miss techniques, knowledge, and tools to develop greener software. Indeed, all such studies suggest that green software should be part of a modern Computer Science Curriculum. In this paper, we present survey results from both researchers' and educators' perspective on green software education. These surveys confirm the lack of courses and educational material for teaching green software in current higher education. Additionally, we highlight three key pedagogical challenges in bringing green software to computer science curriculum and discussed existing solutions to address these key challenges. We firmly believe that 'green thinking"and the broad adoption of green software in computer science curriculum can greatly benefit our environment, society, and students in an era where software is everywhere and evolves in an unprecedented speed. © 2021 Owner/Author.

2021

Identification of microservices from monolithic applications through topic modelling

Authors
Brito, M; Cunha, J; Saraiva, J;

Publication
SAC '21: The 36th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, Virtual Event, Republic of Korea, March 22-26, 2021

Abstract
Microservices emerged as one of the most popular architectural patterns in the recent years given the increased need to scale, grow and flexibilize software projects accompanied by the growth in cloud computing and DevOps. Many software applications are being submitted to a process of migration from its monolithic architecture to a more modular, scalable and flexible architecture of microservices. This process is slow and, depending on the project's complexity, it may take months or even years to complete. This paper proposes a new approach on microservice identification by resorting to topic modelling in order to identify services according to domain terms. This approach in combination with clustering techniques produces a set of services based on the original software. The proposed methodology is implemented as an open-source tool for exploration of monolithic architectures and identification of microservices. A quantitative analysis using the state of the art metrics on independence of functionality and modularity of services was conducted on 200 open-source projects collected from GitHub. Cohesion at message and domain level metrics' showed medians of roughly 0.6. Interfaces per service exhibited a median of 1.5 with a compact interquartile range. Structural and conceptual modularity revealed medians of 0.2 and 0.4 respectively. Our first results are positive demonstrating beneficial identification of services due to overall metrics' results. © 2021 ACM.

2021

Statically Analyzing the Energy Efficiency of Software Product Lines

Authors
Couto, M; Fernandes, JP; Saraiva, J;

Publication
JOURNAL OF LOW POWER ELECTRONICS AND APPLICATIONS

Abstract
Optimizing software to become (more) energy efficient is an important concern for the software industry. Although several techniques have been proposed to measure energy consumption within software engineering, little work has specifically addressed Software Product Lines (SPLs). SPLs are a widely used software development approach, where the core concept is to study the systematic development of products that can be deployed in a variable way, e.g., to include different features for different clients. The traditional approach for measuring energy consumption in SPLs is to generate and individually measure all products, which, given their large number, is impractical. We present a technique, implemented in a tool, to statically estimate the worst-case energy consumption for SPLs. The goal is to reason about energy consumption in all products of a SPL, without having to individually analyze each product. Our technique combines static analysis and worst-case prediction with energy consumption analysis, in order to analyze products in a feature-sensitive manner: a feature that is used in several products is analyzed only once, while the energy consumption is estimated once per product. This paper describes not only our previous work on worst-case prediction, for comprehensibility, but also a significant extension of such work. This extension has been realized in two different axis: firstly, we incorporated in our methodology a simulated annealing algorithm to improve our worst-case energy consumption estimation. Secondly, we evaluated our new approach in four real-world SPLs, containing a total of 99 software products. Our new results show that our technique is able to estimate the worst-case energy consumption with a mean error percentage of 17.3% and standard deviation of 11.2%.

2021

On the Runtime and Energy Performance of WebAssembly Is WebAssembly superior to JavaScript yet?

Authors
De Macedo, J; Abreu, R; Pereira, R; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2021 36TH IEEE/ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTOMATED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING WORKSHOPS (ASEW 2021)

Abstract
In the early days of the world wide web, browsers were developed to navigate through (static) HTML web page documents. This has changed dramatically, and nowadays web pages are dynamic, expressed by programs written in regular programming languages. As a result, browsers are almost operating systems, having to interpret/compile such programs and execute them within the browser itself. Currently, while JavaScript is the main de facto language to express web pages, it does have various short comings and performance inefficiencies. WebAssembly, a new portable and size/load efficient alternative developed by major IT powerhouses, is seen as the future substitute. As WebAssembly aims to be more performance efficient than JavaScript, we aim to look at this current status and present a preliminary study on the performance of these two, based on their runtime and energy efficiency. Preliminary results show that WebAssembly, while still in its infancy, is starting to already challenge JavaScript, with much more room to grow. Additionally, our benchmarking framework is also made available to allow further research and replication.

2021

On Understanding Contextual Changes of Failures

Authors
Ribeiro, F; Abreu, R; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2021 IEEE 21ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE QUALITY, RELIABILITY AND SECURITY (QRS 2021)

Abstract
Recent studies show that many real-world software faults are due to slight modifications (mutations) to the program. Thus, analyzing transformations made by a developer and associating them with well-known mutation operators can help pinpoint and repair the root cause of failures. This paper proposes a mutation operator inference technique: given the original program and one of its subsequent forms, it infers which mutation operators would transform the original and produce such a version. Moreover, we implemented this technique as a tool called Morpheus, which analyzes faulty Java programs. We have also validated both the technique and tool by analyzing a repository with 1753 modifications for 20 different programs, successfully inferring mutation operators 78% of times. Furthermore, we also show that several program versions result from not just a single mutation operator but multiple ones. In the end, we resort to real-world case studies to demonstrate the advantages of this approach regarding program repair.

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