Mariano Martinez Peck
Software engineer currently doing a PhD in computer science at Ecole des Mines in association with RMOD-INRIA.
Blog: http://marianopeck.wordpress.com
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Resume / CV (& misc)
You can download my CV from here
Research
Context: Embedded Software Development
Developing software for embedded systems is a challenging task. Targeted devices are subject to various constraints on computational resources (CPU, Memory), on energetic resources (battery) and on input/output peripherals (keyboard, mouse, screen. . . ) to name a few. The traditional approach to deal with these constraints consist in using low-level languages such as C or even assembly. A more comfortable solution appeared in recent years consist in using higher-level languages such as Java with J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) or C# with .Net compact framework. However, developers have to use only a sub-set of libraries and language features used for developing desktop applications. For example, KVM the VM implementation for J2ME CLDC1 does not support many features of the regular JVM such as reflection, generics, annotations, extended for loops, static imports, and auto-boxing/unboxing.
Besides, developers have to explicitly select libraries to use: desktop libraries or embedded libraries depending on the application purpose. This selection process of elements that have to be integrated in a final application is essentially a manually process (e.g declaration of import clause in Java). It is also a coarse-grained process because it only enables class or package selection. Therefore, the final application still contains unused code (methods, fields, ...).
Objectives
The work to be carried out as part of this PhD thesis aimed at providing a solution (model and tools) that unifies software development of both desktop and embedded software. Starting from the same library, the proposed solution will enable to develop software either for desktop or embedded systems. During the deployment phase, an extreme remodularization will be applied to the software code according to the target system constraints. This automatic process will identify packages, classes, methods or even fields that are not used by the software and will remove them in the final version. Further, a dynamic remodularization process could also minimizes the memory footprint of the final software by loading and unloading the different parts of the program during its execution.
The PhD student will validate its results through experimentation on different embedded systems such as PDAs, Smartphones as well as mobile robotic systems.
My idea of the PhD
I am thinking in the idea, not in any implementation or solution in particular. I imagine having a smalltalk that fits better for limited hardware such as PDA, mobile phones, iPhone, robots among others. My idea is to have a minimal, but really minimal kernel loaded at the beginning. I mean, the minimal you need to boostrap. Then, you have also a kind of repository which is in a non volatile memory. I mean, it is in a hdd for example, but not in RAM. This repository can be .sources, something like an ENVY library, an ImageSegment written to a file, or whatever.
You then have your applications or whatever that runs on top of that smalltalk. This smalltalk will load the necessary things for this application, with two conditions: 1) it will do it at runtime in a lazy way, just when needed. 2) the application does not have to explicitly tell smalltalk what it needs to load. This must be done automatically.
Of course, this Smalltalk will see if whatever it needs is loaded and if it is not, it will search it in the repository and then loaded in the image. The granularity here can be method, class, package, segment, etc. I really don't know.
So it should be possible to have (at some point) a mechanism that does this not only on code, but on any object. There are a lot of objects in a Pharo image that are just data. (fonts, sounds, bitmaps...). Another idea is to also unload stuff when this is not needed any more.
Publications
'2015'
- . Ghost: A Uniform and General-Purpose Proxy Implementation. In Journal of Object Technology 98 p. 339-359, 2015. DOI →
'2014'
- . Fuel: A Fast General-Purpose Object Graph Serializer. In Journal of Software: Practice and Experience 44 p. 433-453, 2014. DOI →
'2013'
- . Marea: An Efficient Application-Level Object Graph Swapper. In Journal of Object Technology 12(1) p. 2:1-30, January 2013. DOI →
- . Managing Projects with Metacello. In Deep Into Pharo, p. 42, Square Bracket Associates, 2013. →
'2012'
- . Application-Level Virtual Memory for Object-Oriented Systems. Ph.D. thesis, Ecole des Mines de Douai - France & Université Lille 1 - France, 2012. →
'2011'
- . Object Swapping Challenges: an Evaluation of ImageSegment. In Journal of Computer Languages, Systems and Structures 38(1) p. 1—15, November 2011. DOI →
- . Problems and Challenges when Building a Manager for Unused Objects. In Proceedings of Smalltalks 2011 International Workshop, Bernal, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2011. →
- . Efficient Proxies in Smalltalk. In Proceedings of ESUG International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies (IWST'11), Edinburgh, Scotland, 2011. DOI →
- . Clustered Serialization with Fuel. In Proceedings of ESUG International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies (IWST 2011), Edinburgh, Scotland, 2011. DOI →
'2010'
- . Experiments with a Fast Object Swapper. In Smalltalks 2010, Concepción del Uruguay, Argentina, 2010. →
- . Visualizing Objects and Memory Usage. In Smalltalks 2010, Concepción del Uruguay, Argentina, 2010. →
Contact
Phone: 2111 Phone (full): \+33 (0)3 27 71 21 11 Email: marianopeck@gmail.com
Address:
Ecole des Mines de Douai - Dépt. I.A - NORD EUROPE 941 rue Charles Bourseul - B.P. 10838 59508 Douai Cedex France