Programming Methodology for Multi-Core Concurrency and Adaptation

今天的软件密集型系统包括从移动设备到嵌入式软件产品再到全球联网系统。随着我们越来越依赖软件，软件的可靠性越来越受到社会的关注。我们的长期目标是“正确软件”的理想。这个项目的贡献是通过解决两个问题：并发性和适应性，使软件的设计和发展更加可靠。

Today's software-intensive systems range from mobile devices to products with embedded software to worldwide-networked systems. As we become increasingly dependent on software, the reliability of software is of increasing concern to society. Our long-term goal is the ideal of "correct software". The contributions of this project are making the design and evolution of software more reliable by addressing two issues: concurrency and adaptation. Software is more and more written for concurrent execution due to the emergence of multi-core processors. By supporting concurrent execution, multi-core processors offer higher performance at lower power consumption, which has benefits like extended utility of mobile devices, reduced need for cooling, and lower operating cost. Correctness of concurrency is notoriously difficult to achieve. The theory of "atomic actions" addresses this by allowing a stepwise introduction of concurrency. We plan to develop efficient implementation techniques for an object-oriented programming language with atomic actions. Software systems are also "multi-faceted" and constantly evolving. Concerns, like authentication, fault- tolerance, privacy, power consumption, distribution, and concurrency tend to affect many parts of a program and are difficult to isolate. Static "aspects" allow such concerns to be implemented during the development in stages. Additional functionality needs to be implemented and concerns need to be improved during evolution. Deployed and continuously operating systems have to be extended and modified for this. Dynamic "mix-ins" allow such adaptation. The correctness of aspects and mix-ins is an open issue. We plan to define a theory of "behaviour-preserving" aspects and mix-ins and have an "intelligent" compiler analyze this. Such an analysis, for example, allows to detect if a software update would break existing functionality.