Despite the popularity of Java, problems may arise from potential data-race conditionsduring execution of a Java program. Data-races are considered errors in concurrent pro-gramming languages and greatly complicate both programming and runtime optimizationefforts. A race-free version of Java is therefore…

Programs written for machine execution will always be susceptible to information theft. This information can include trademarked algorithms, data embedded in the program, or even data the program accesses. As technology advances computer scientists are building more and more powerful…

The pure methods in a program are those that exhibit functional or side effect free behaviour, a useful property of methods or code in the context of program optimization as well as program understanding. However, gathering purity data is not…

This thesis presents a novel idea for object allocation, cache line reservation (CLR), whose goal is to reduce data cache misses. Certain objects are allocated from "reserved" cache lines, so that they do not evict other objects that will be…

To achieve the best performance, most computer languages are compiled, either ahead of time and statically, or dynamically during runtime by means of a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. Optimizing compilers are complex, however, and for many languages such as Ruby, Python,…

Speculative multithreading (SpMT), also known as thread level speculation (TLS), is a dynamic parallelization technique that relies on out-of-order execution, dependence buffering, and misspeculation rollback to achieve speedup of sequential programs on multiprocessors. A large number of hardware studies have…

My dissertation explores the eclectic singing careers of sisters Eva and Juliette Gauthier. Born in Ottawa, Eva and Juliettte were aided in their musical aspirations by the patronage of Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier and his wife Lady Zoë. They both…

Numerous techniques mine change data captured in software archives to assist software engineering efforts. These change-based approaches typically analyze change sets -- groups of co-committed changes -- under the assumption that the development work represented by change sets is both…

The largest naturally-occurring lake of hyperacid brine in the world is located in the crater of Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java, Indonesia. The hyperacid Banyu Pahit River flows down the side of Kawah Ijen and is a major source…

Designers of software components can use finite-state properties to denote behavioral interface specifications which enforce client-side programming rules that state how the components ought to be used. This allows users of these components to check their client code for compliance…