Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In today's world more and more systems involve the use of computers in real-time decision making. Such systems might include braking systems in cars, medical devices, power-plant control, and so on. These are real-time system and their correct functioning is often critical to life and property. At the same time, the computing world is undergoing a shift to parallel systems. This is forced for reasons of performance, convenience, distribution, and hardware redundancy. There is a serious problem here. The traditional method of ensuring that software is safe is testing, but this method is far less effective for parallel systems. Over the past five years, my students and I have been working on the design of an object-oriented, concurrent programming language for use in high-reliability embedded systems and on the implementation of such languages on emerging classes of programmable hardware, particularly coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs). The current proposal is to carry on this work and extend it to automated verification of concurrent programs. Automated verification is of particular importance for concurrent systems, as nondeterminism makes testing ineffective for guaranteeing reliability of such systems. We will also extend the implementation work to a complete implementation on hetrogeneous systems consisting of (multicore) microprocessors and reconfigurable hardware.