Context: Computational materials science (CMS) focuses on in silico experiments to compute the properties of known and novel materials, where many software packages are used in the community. The NOMAD Laboratory1 offers to store the input and output files in its FAIR data repository. Since the file formats of these software packages are non-standardized, parsers are used to provide the results in a normalized format. Objective: The main goal of this article is to report experience and findings of using grammar-based fuzzing on these parsers. Method: We have constructed an input grammar for four common software packages in the CMS domain and performed an experimental evaluation on the capabilities of grammar-based fuzzing to detect failures in the NOMAD parsers. Results: With our approach, we were able to identify three unique critical bugs concerning the service availability, as well as several additional syntactic, semantic, logical, and downstream bugs in the investigated NOMAD parsers. We reported all issues to the developer team prior to publication. Conclusion: Based on the experience gained, we can recommend grammar-based fuzzing also for other research software packages to improve the trust level in the correctness of the produced results.

Machine learning-based code smell detection has been demonstrated to be a valuable approach for improving software quality and enabling developers to identify problematic patterns in code. However, previous researches have shown that the code smell datasets commonly used to train these models are heavily imbalanced. While some recent studies have explored the use of imbalanced learning techniques for code smell detection, they have only evaluated a limited number of techniques and thus their conclusions about the most effective methods may be biased and inconclusive. To thoroughly evaluate the effect of imbalanced learning techniques on machine learning-based code smell detection, we examine 31 imbalanced learning techniques with seven classifiers to build code smell detection models on four code smell data sets. We employ four evaluation metrics to assess the detection performance with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Cliff’s δ. The results show that (1) Not all imbalanced learning techniques significantly improve detection performance, but deep forest significantly outperforms the other techniques on all code smell data sets. (2) SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling TEchnique) is not the most effective technique for resampling code smell data sets. (3) The best-performing imbalanced learning techniques and the top-3 data resampling techniques have little time cost for code smell detection. Therefore, we provide some practical guidelines. First, researchers and practitioners should select the appropriate imbalanced learning techniques (e.g., deep forest) to ameliorate the class imbalance problem. In contrast, the blind application of imbalanced learning techniques could be harmful. Then, better data resampling techniques than SMOTE should be selected to preprocess the code smell data sets.

Recently, Kubernetes is widely used to manage and schedule the resources of microservices in cloud-native distributed applications, as the most famous container orchestration framework. However, Kubernetes preferentially schedules microservices to nodes with rich and balanced CPU and memory resources on a single node. The native scheduler of Kubernetes, called Kube-scheduler, may cause resource fragmentation and decrease resource utilization. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning enhanced Kubernetes scheduler named DRS. To improve resource utilization and reduce load imbalance, we first present the Kubernetes scheduling problem as a Markov decision process and elaborately designed the state, action, and reward. Then, we design and implement DRS mointor to perceive six metrics about resource utilization to construct a comprehensive global resource view. Finally, DRS can automatically learn the scheduling policy through interaction with the Kubernetes cluster, without relying on expert knowledge about workload and cluster status. We implement a prototype of DRS in a Kubernetes cluster with five nodes and evaluate its performance. Experimental results highlight that DRS overcomes the shortcomings of Kube-scheduler and achieve the expected scheduling target with three workloads. Compared with Kube-scheduler, DRS brings an improvement of 27.29% in resource utilization and reduce the load imbalance by 2 .90× on average, with only 3.27% CPU overhead and 0.648% communication latency.

Intel includes on its recent processors a powerful set of instructions capable of processing 512-bit registers with a single instruction (AVX-512). Some of these instructions have no equivalent in earlier instruction sets. We leverage these instructions to efficiently transcode strings between the most common formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. With our novel algorithms, we are often twice as fast as the previous best solutions. For example, we transcode Chinese text from UTF-8 to UTF-16 at more than 5 GiB s − 1 using fewer than 2 CPU instructions per character. To ensure reproducibility, we make our software freely available as an open source library.

Android occupies a high market share, and its broad functions make Android security matter. Research reveals that many security issues are caused by insecure coding practices. As a poor design indicator, code smell threatens the safety and quality assurance of Android applications (apps). Although previous works revealed specific problems associated with code smells, the field still lacks research reflecting Android features. Moreover, the cost and time limit developers to repairing numerous smells timely. We conducted a study, including definition, detection, and impact quantification for Android code smell (DefDIQ): (1) define 15 novel code smells in Android from a security programming perspective; meanwhile, we provide suggestions on how to eliminate or mitigate them; (2) implement DACS to automatically detect the custom code smells based on ASTs; (3) investigate the correlation between individual smells with DACS detection results, and select suitable code smells to construct fault counting models, then quantify their impact on quality, and thereby generating code smell repair priorities. We conducted experiments on 4,575 open-source apps, and the findings are: (i) Lin’s CCC between DACS and manual detection results reaches 0.9994, verifying the validity; (ii) the fault counting model constructed by ZINB is superior to NB (AIC = 517.32, BIC = 522.12); some smells do indicate fault-proneness, and we identify such avoidable poor designs; (iii) different code smells have different importance and the repair priorities constructed provide a practical guideline for researchers and inexperienced developers.