ConcSys: Reliable and Efficient Complex, Concurrent Software Systems

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Pradel
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2014 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 255842496

Many of today's and most of tomorrow's complex software systems are concurrent. Modern smart phones, laptops, and desktop computers have multi-core processors, which can be exploited only by concurrent software. Automotive software systems build upon various computing devices, which each have multiple cores and which interact with each other concurrently. Scientific computing leverages clusters of interconnected computers to achieve large-scale parallelism. Common to all these systems is the need for concurrent software, where multiple threads of execution can proceed in parallel and occasionally synchronize with each other. Programming concurrent software has always been difficult and traditionally has been mastered by a small set of experts. However, the increasing prevalence of parallelism is bringing concurrent programming on the agenda of ordinary programmers.The ConcSys project develops program analyses and software systems that help ordinary programmers to make complex, concurrent systems significantly more reliable and efficient than they are today. To achieve this goal, the project combines scalable static analysis, precise dynamic analysis, and automatic test generation. This combination is beneficial because dynamic analysis addresses the inherent imprecision of scalable static analysis, while automatic test generation provides a driver for dynamically analyzing a program. To underpin our work, we develop a framework for evaluating our techniques in a rigorous and comparable way. The ConcSys project focuses on approaches that are applicable to large, real-world systems with millions of lines of code and therefore, will contribute towards making tomorrow's software systems reliable and efficient.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Person: Professor Koushik Sen