[François Taïani] Software

Here are some programs I have developped or contributed to during the course of my research or that of my students.

• DAISY: a demonstration platform for interceptor-based replication in CORBA
• CosmOpen: a reverse-engineering environment for today's complex software systems
• AIDA: the Aspect Interaction Detection Analysis tool developed by my student Nathan Weston, in collaboration with my colleague Awais Rashid. AIDA is now part of the Common Aspect Proof Environment (CAPE) of the EU Project AOSD Europe.
• PAMPA Variants: a work with Hugo Miranda from the University of Lisbon and Carl Fisher from Lancaster University on variants of Hugo's Power Aware Propagation algorithm. You will find below some scripts and code related to this work.
• GossipKit & Whispers: an event-driven component framework (GossipKit) and a domain specific language (Whispers) for epidemic protocols developed by my student Shen Lin, in collaboration with my colleagues Gordon Blair from Lancaster University, Anne-Marie Kermarrec and Marin Bertier from INRIA Rennes/IRISA.
• Profvis: a visualisation tool to help developpers navigate the HPROF output of unfamiliar programs, developped in collaboration with my student Shen Lin, and my colleagues Tom Ormerod and Linden Ball from Lancaster's Department of Psychology. Profvis exploits the structural information present in profiling call trees to selectively raise or lower the abstraction level at which performance data is presented, greatly simplifying the task of exploring complex profiling data.

PAMPA Variants

The archive below contains a modified version of the original PAMPA ns2 implementation that provides different variants of the algorithm. The archive also contains a ruby script to easily run a large number of simulations, while keeping track of the results and of the parameter sets you have used. (The scripts are rather primitive, but hopefully useful.) You will need ns2 and NOAH to compile the modified PAMPA files. Detailed instructions on how to do this are available on Hugo Miranda's PAMPA page.

• Count on me: Lightweight Ad-Hoc Broadcasting in Heterogeneous Topologies
  Carl Ellis, Hugo Miranda, François Taïani, In Proceedings of the Int. Workshop on Middleware For Pervasive Mobile and Embedded Computing (Urbana Champaign, Illinois, Nov. 30, 2009) M-PAC '09. , in collocation with the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 10th Int. Middleware Conf. (Middleware 2009). ACM, New York, NY, pp.1-6, ISBN:978-1-60558-849-0, abstract, complete document, talk, doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1657127.1657129.

  ACM Copyright Notice: © ACM, 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the international Workshop on Middleware For Pervasive Mobile and Embedded Computing (Urbana Champaign, Illinois, November 30 - 30, 2009). M-PAC '09. ACM, New York, NY, p.1-6, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1657127.1657129

CosmOpen

CosmOpen is a suite of reverse-engineering tools that helps developpers understand the complex behavioural relationships found in large software. CosmOpen allows users to navigate and mine otherwise intractable call graphes, and rapidly construct behavioural views of a complex system from a huge amount of dynamic data.

I have used CosmOpen to partially reverse-engineer an industry-grade CORBA implementation, Orbacus (Figure 1), and identify the key elements of a request lifecycle inside the ORB (Figure 2).

Figure 1 shows the interaction diagram that is obtained when directly observing Orbacus. This diagram is pretty much incomprehensible, whereas the filtered-out version of Figure 2, which was obtained with CosmOpen, clearly shows the different stages of a request's processing, from the socket connection ('accept'), up to the execution of the remote server method ('Hello_impl'), and through to the reply being sent ('send'). This second diagram also highlights the various threads involved and their relationships, something that is completely hidden by the original diagram's complexity.

Fig. 1: Orbacus's 4.1.2 request processing, obtained by CosmOpen's observation tool, dyngdb. This graph was constructed from 658 stack traces, totalling 9178 stack frames. It contains 2065 individual invocations, over 50 C-functions and 140 C++ classes.
 

Fig. 2: An abstract representation of the above graph, obtained with CosmOpen's Graph Manipulation tool, OPSBrowser. You can easily see the low level socket operations used by orbacus (accept, send, recv), as well as the multiple threads spawned to process the request (t3, the accepting thread, t8, the receiver thread, t4, the worker thread).
 

The CosmOpen suite is made of three components: dyngdb, hydrogen, and OPSBrowser:

• dyngdb is a dynamic data extraction tool, that automatically captures execution traces from a C++ executable by monitoring the gnu debugger gdb. It then uses an AWK script to produce an XML formatted file containing the stack-traces gathered from the running executable.
• hydrogen is a static data extraction tool which is based on Doxygen, and extract structural information regarding the classes of a C++ program. Extracted data are saved in an XML format as well.
• OPSBrowser is the most important part of the suite. It allows users to visualize and manipulate the data captured by the two other tools using a graph transformation language. The visualization is delegated to the dot layout program from ATT Labs.

Right now, only OPSBrowser and dyngdb are available under the GNU General Public License.

• CosmOpen: Dynamic reverse-engineering on a budget (journal version)
  François Taïani, Marc-Olivier Killijian, Jean-Charles Fabre, Software: Practice and Experience, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 39(18): (Dec. 2009) pp. 1467-1514 (48p.), abstract, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.943. This paper is an extended version of the technical report COMP-002-2008. You may also want to look at the slides of my corresponding talk.

• CosmOpen: A Reverse-Engineering Tool for Complex Open-Source Architectures
  François Taïani, Rapport LAAS No03226 Student Forum of DSN'03, The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, San Francisco, CA, June 22nd-25th, 2003, pp.A49-A51 (3 p.), abstract, complete document.

Note Right now, the software has only be tested under Linux and Mac OS X. It should be fairly portable to other platforms, but this requires a little tuning. This is beta software, and there's certainly plenty of improvement room. If you need help or have suggestion, please contact me at f.taiani@lancaster.ac.uk.

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Last generated on 3 May 2012       f.taiani@lancaster.ac.uk