Abstract

pile the program to the new instruction set, or . use a variety of software methods to interpret or translate the application. We focus in this special issue on the third class, the software methods that let you translate at runtime or while offline. Each of the three articles that follow demonstrates a different approach to software translation: . Hewlett-Packard's dynamic translator, Aries, eases the transition of applications from HP's Precision Architecture to IA-64, . IBM Research's BOA translates the legacy PowerPC code of a full system rather than just the application code, and . The University of Queensland's UQBT is a binary translation system that---instead of translating between a specific pair of instruction sets---lets you generalize binary translation and work between virtually any two architectures. Figure 1 shows the universe of three various translations. THREE TYPES OF TRANSLATION Software-based binary translation systems---including those discussed

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