Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!thunder!water!wlrush
From: wlrush@water.waterloo.edu (Wenchantress Wench Wendall)
Newsgroups: ont.events,uw.talks,uw.cs.grad
Subject: MASTER'S THESIS PRESENTATION
Keywords: Mr. Stefan Vorkoetter, graduate student,
Message-ID: <2547@water.waterloo.edu>
Date: 28 Jul 89 11:47:20 GMT
Distribution: ont
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 40

Dept. of Computer Science, will speak on 
``Software Portability by Virtual Machine Emulation.''

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

MASTER'S THESIS PRESENTATION

                    -Wednesday, August 2, 1989

Mr.  Stefan  Vorhoetter,  graduate  student,  Dept.  of
Computer  Science, will speak on ``Software Portability
by Virtual Machine Emulation.''

TIME:                 3:30 p.m.

ROOM:              DC 1304

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of diverse computer architectures has
resulted  in  an  increased need for portable software,
but  many  portability  techniques  incur a performance
penalty.   This  penalty  can be reduced by restricting
the  range  of architectures to which a program must be
portable,  at  the  risk of limiting portability to new
hardware as it becomes available.

In  this  thesis  we  examine  a technique for making a
program  portable to architectures for which it was not
intended,  without  affecting  its performance on other
architectures.   The  technique used is virtual machine
emulation,   whereby   an   ideal   (for  the  program)
architecture  is  emulated  by  another  program  on an
incompatible  system.  By designing the virtual machine
carefully,  performance  loss  due  to emulation can be
minimized,   and  the  program  to  be  ported  can  be
recompiled    for    the    virtual   machine   without
modification.