Martin Vechev

(IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York)

"Machine-Assisted Concurrent Programming"

Virtually all chips today are built with an increasing number of processor cores. To leverage these hardware trends, all future software will have to be concurrent.

The main challenge in developing reliable concurrent software is that a programmer is forced to coordinate a fantastic number of possible interactions. Manual coordination of these interactions (e.g., via locks) has proven to be extremely time consuming, and brittle, often resulting in programs that are incorrect, do not fully utilize the underlying computational resources, or both.

In this talk, I will present new techniques that harness the growing power of modern hardware and the increasing maturity of formal methods to simplify the process of program construction: in essence, given a concurrent program that violates a desired property, the techniques will analyze the (possibly infinite-state) program and attempt to automatically repair it by synthesizing the necessary synchronization.

A tool implementing these techniques has been successfully applied to a variety of challenging problems: from discovering tricky synchronization under weak memory models, to enforcing general atomicity properties, to obtaining new concurrent data structures and memory management algorithms.

Bio: Martin Vechev is a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. His research interests are in software analysis, programming languages, verification, and concurrency. He is interested in developing tools and techniques that improve software quality and programmer productivity. He is the recipient of a Best Paper Award, IBM Research Outstanding Technical Achievement and Extraordinary Accomplishment Awards and a John Atanasoff Award, awarded by the president of Bulgaria. He holds a B.Sc. from Simon Fraser University, Canada, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England.

Martin Vechev is a faculty applicant.

Zeit:	Montag, 18.04.2011, 11.00 Uhr
Ort:	Kaiserslautern, MPI-SWS Gebäude, Raum 206
Hinweis:	Der Vortrag wird live nach Saarbrücken MPI-SWS Gebäude, Wartburg, 5. Stock übertragen.