Performance engineering of the StarLogo Nova Execution Engine
Name
1018309466-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
2.79 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5692f21ad589bc553b68198eb3f5d38e
Author(s)
Pan, Jin, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor(s)
Eric Klopfer.
Date Issued
2016
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
StarLogo Nova is an online blocks-based programming environment designed for pre-college students to explore the collective behavior of decentralized agents. Users can drag and drop blocks to construct graphical scripts that control how individual agents respond to stimuli. These scripts are run by the Execution Engine and rendered in real-time. By investigating hypotheses about how small tweaks to individual behavior impact the entire system, students learn to think beyond the centralized mindset where all actions are dictated by a singular leader. This thesis migrates the Execution Engine from the aging Adobe ActionScript 3 language to TypeScript, a weakly typed language that transpiles to JavaScript. To promote code health, this thesis introduces code formatters, linters, test cases, and a build process. Finally, this thesis optimizes the StarLogo Nova Execution Engine for performance, consistently beating the previous engine and bringing the execution time per cycle for key benchmarks under 10 milliseconds.
Description
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (page 117).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
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