List of Papers This thesis is based on the following papers, which are referred to in the text by their Roman numerals. The methodology used in this paper was previously presented in [99]. Reprints are made with permission from the publishers. My Contribution Paper I. In the work related to Paper I, I participated in developing the Windows version of LUNAR. I also performed initial verification...

In the modern, multi-threaded, multi-core programming environment, correctly managing system resources such as locks and shared variables can be especially difficult and error-prone. A simple error, such as forgetting to release a lock, can have major consequences on the correct operation of the program (e.g. deadlock), often at a time and location that is isolated from the original error. Whil...

We consider the problem of searching a document collection using a set of independent computers. That is, the computers do not cooperate with one another either (i) to acquire their local index of documents or (ii) during the retrieval of a document. During the acquisition phase, each computer is assumed to randomly sample a subset of the entire collection. During retrieval, the query is issued...