Descrizione del progetto
Verificare i linguaggi di programmazione concorrenti tradizionali ed emergenti
L’obiettivo generale del progetto VAPLCS, finanziato dall’UE, è quello di sviluppare un nuovo modello per descrivere formalmente la semantica dei programmi concorrenti. Il modello dovrebbe consentire un’implementazione semplice, fornire garanzie di facile impiego, essere sufficientemente robusto per gli algoritmi concorrenti ed essere adatto a una verifica scalabile. A tal fine, i ricercatori sfrutteranno il proprio recente lavoro, che affronta i difetti nel modello di concorrenza C/C++ e nel controllo del modello in una determinata semantica di concorrenza debole. Inoltre, il team di ricerca svilupperà metodi di verifica pratica per agevolare la programmazione concorrente. I risultati del progetto dovrebbero incrementare significativamente l’applicabilità della verifica, colmare un importante divario tra la ricerca nel campo della verifica e la programmazione concorrente pratica, nonché chiarire il ruolo della semantica sottostante.
Obiettivo
"With the proliferation of multi-core processors, concurrent programming regularly appears at the core of heavily relied-upon systems, where both performance and correctness are of paramount importance. The canonical concurrency model is sequential consistency-identifying concurrent programs with all possible interleavings of operations of their constitute threads. It is a simple model for programmers, but unsatisfactory as a programming language concurrency semantics. First, performance-wise, it is too costly to implement. In fact, no commodity hardware provides sequential consistency. Second, the number of interleavings is often so large, posing the infamous ""state explosion problem"" as the utmost obstacle to any verification attempt.
Our overarching goal is to develop a novel concurrency semantics for programming languages that will: allow efficient implementation; provide easily usable guarantees, sufficiently strong for concurrent algorithms; and be amenable to scalable verification. To achieve this, we will leverage our recent advances in addressing the flaws in the C/C++ and Java specifications and in model checking under certain weak concurrency semantics. Moreover, we will develop practical verification methods to facilitate the task of concurrent programming.
This proposal makes a conceptual leap beyond the state-of-the-art, by identifying the development of a weak concurrency semantics not only as an unfortunate necessity, but also as an opportunity to revolutionize software verification. It is high-risk: it tackles a longstanding open problem in programming languages. It is also high-gain: it will significantly increase the applicability of verification, bridge a major gap between verification research and practical concurrent programming, and shed light on the role of the underlying semantics. I aim for the proposed concurrency semantics to provide new foundations for the specifications of mainstream and emerging programming languages.
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Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
69978 Tel Aviv
Israele