SHF:Small: Collaborative research: Language-Integrated Verification for Deterministic Parallelism

正式验证承诺交付的软件能够精确地按照给定的数学规范工作。在过去的十年中，我们看到了一些令人印象深刻的经过正式验证的软件工件，它们可以证明没有大量的缺陷。然而，这些工件需要巨大的工程壮举，使用专门的证明助手，这些助手与用于设计高效并行软件的遗留语言和库之间存在着巨大的鸿沟。这个项目的新奇之处在于新技术能够开发出高效的并行计算系统，并保证其正确性和可靠性。这个项目的影响将是使正式验证成为主流软件开发的一部分。这个项目将以研究者发现的两种方法为基础。第一种是精化反射，它将现有的编程语言变成定理证明器，其中的证明仅仅是用同一种语言编写的程序。其次，研究人员引入了格变量、调度算法和一种新的线性类型系统，以简化具有良好定义行为的高效并行软件的构建。该项目将上述想法结合到一个框架中，工程师可以通过简单地用宿主语言编写程序来开发和验证并行软件，从而在现有软件开发周期中经济地集成正式证明。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Formal verification promises to deliver software that works precisely according to a given mathematical specification. The last decade has seen several impressive formally verified software artifacts that are provably free of large classes of defects. However, these artifacts required Herculean feats of engineering, using specialized proof assistants that are separated, by a wide chasm, from the legacy languages and libraries that are used to engineer efficient parallel software. This project's novelties are in new techniques to enable the development of efficient parallel computing systems with formal assurances about correctness and reliability. This project's impacts will be to make formal verification a part of mainstream software development.This project will build on two approaches discovered by the investigators. The first is refinement reflection, which turns existing programming languages into theorem provers, where the proofs are merely programs in that same language. Second, the investigators have introduced lattice variables, scheduling algorithms and a new linear type system to simplify the construction of efficient parallel software with well-defined behavior. This project will combine the above ideas into a framework wherein engineers can develop and verify parallel software, simply by writing programs in their host language, thereby economically integrating formal proofs within existing software development cycles.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.