Typhon: A Developer's Tool for Refactoring Legacy Software for Multi-threaded Operation
Navy SBIR FY2013.2


Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2013.2
Topic No.: N132-099
Topic Title: Typhon: A Developer's Tool for Refactoring Legacy Software for Multi-threaded Operation
Proposal No.: N132-099-0012
Firm: ATC - NY
33 Thornwood Drive, Suite 500
Ithaca, New York 14850
Contact: Hajime Inoue
Phone: (607) 257-1975
Web Site: www.atcorp.com
Abstract: Several mission-critical Navy applications are written as single-threaded Component Object Model) COM applications. They do not receive any benefits from the recent trend in computer architecture that emphasizes concurrent execution of multiple threads. ATC-NY will build Typhon, a plugin for Visual Studio that will aid developers in transforming such applications to take advantage of multiple threads. Typhon analyzes the source of legacy applications to automatically identify multi-threaded optimization opportunities. When it can prove multi-threaded optimizations are safe, Typhon automatically transforms code to take advantage of them. When it cannot, it annotates the source to identify the type of optimization and how it could be made safe. By leveraging knowledge of how COM works, Typhon is able to identify more optimizations than existing parallelizing compilers. In addition, TyphonA��'A,A�A�A�A��,���A,A�A�A�A��,��_A,A�s integration with Visual Studio enables it to suggest refactoring strategies that would create additional optimization opportunities. Typhon supports Visual Basic 6 and other Visual Studio languages like C and C++.
Benefits: Typhon enables legacy single-threaded COM applications to take advantage of multi-threading, increasing the speed of these applications on modern processors that have multiple cores. DoD and other government organizations that use legacy COM-based applications will benefit from Typhon through increased productivity of the developers who are charged with optimizing the applications and through the increased performance of the applications. Similarly, Typhon would benefit any commercial organization with legacy COM-based applications.

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