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  1. Many data processing systems allow SQL queries that call user-defined functions (UDFs) written in conventional programming languages. While such SQL extensions provide convenience and flexibility to users, queries involving UDFs are not as efficient as their pure SQL counterparts that invoke SQL’s highly-optimized built-in functions. Motivated by this problem, we propose a new technique for translating SQL queries with UDFs to pure SQL expressions. Unlike prior work in this space, our method is not based on syntactic rewrite rules and can handle a much more general class of UDFs. At a high-level, our method is based on counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS) but employs a novel compositional strategy that decomposes the synthesis task into simpler sub-problems. However, because there is no universal decomposition strategy that works for all UDFs, we propose a novel lazy inductive synthesis approach that generates a sequence of decompositions that correspond to increasingly harder inductive synthesis problems. Because most realistic UDF-to-SQL translation tasks are amenable to a fine-grained decomposition strategy, our lazy inductive synthesis method scales significantly better than traditional CEGIS. We have implemented our proposed technique in a tool called CLIS for optimizing Spark SQL programs containing Scala UDFs. To evaluate CLIS, we manually study 100 randomly selected UDFs and find that 63 of them can be expressed in pure SQL. Our evaluation on these 63 UDFs shows that CLIS can automatically synthesize equivalent SQL expressions in 92% of the cases and that it can solve 2.4× more benchmarks compared to a baseline that does not use our compositional approach. We also show that CLIS yields an average speed-up of 3.5× for individual UDFs and 1.3× to 3.1× in terms of end-to-end application performance. 
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  2. In response to the stringent requirements for future DC-link capacitors in electric vehicles (EVs), it is desirable to develop dielectric polymer films with high-temperature tolerance (at least 105 °C) and low loss (dissipation factor, tan δ < 0.003). Although the biaxially oriented poly(ethylene terephthalate) (BOPET) film has an alleged temperature rating of 120 °C, its dielectric performance in terms of breakdown strength and lifetime cannot satisfy the stringent requirements for power electronics in EVs. In this work, we carried out a structure–electrical insulation property relationship study to understand the working mechanism for various PET films, including a commercial BOPET film, an amorphous PET (AmPET) film, and two annealed PET films (AnPET, i.e., cold-crystallized from AmPET). Structural analyses revealed a uniform edge-on crystalline orientation in BOPET with the a* axis in the film normal direction. Meanwhile, a high content of the rigid amorphous fraction (RAF) was identified for BOPET, which resulted from biaxial stretching during processing. On the contrary, AnPET films had a random crystal orientation with lower RAF contents. From dielectric breakdown and lifetime studies, the high-crystallinity AnPET film exhibited better electrical insulation than BOPET, and AmPET had the worst electrical insulation. Electrical conductivity results revealed that the high RAF content in BOPET led to reasonably high breakdown strength and long lifetime only at low temperatures (<100 °C). Meanwhile, PET crystals were more insulating than the amorphous phase, whether mobile, rigid, or glassy. In particular, the flat-on lamellae in the AnPET film were more effective than the edge-on lamellae in BOPET in blocking the conduction of charge carriers (electrons and impurity ions). This understanding will help us design high-temperature semicrystalline polymer films for DC-link capacitors in EVs. 
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