UCI Computer Science Professor Harry Xu and UCLA Professors Miryung Kim and Jens Palsberg have been awarded a $4.9M grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to support their work on reducing software inefficiencies. The grant, “Synergistic Software Customization: Framework, Algorithms, Tools,” will run from 2018-2022.

Xu, who is one of the pioneers in software bloat analysis and has previously collaborated with ONR, says that the main focus of the grant is to “develop a set of static and dynamic program analysis and software customization techniques that can significantly reduce the redundancies and inefficiencies in modern object-oriented big data systems.” The techniques will be applied to widely used Java software — in particular, to large-scale, data-analytical systems such as Hadoop, Spark or AsterixDB. According to Xu, these systems have become increasingly important in modern, big data computing, because they form the backbone of the next-generation cloud computing and internet services. “Our goal is to automatically remove large inefficiencies in these systems, significantly improving their efficiency and making them scale to larger datasets.”