ITR - ASE - int: Event Driven Software Quality

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Proposal 0427202 U of Cal Los Angeles PIs: Jens Palsberg, Eddie Kohler, Rupak Majumdar, Todd Millstein Event-Driven Software Quality Event-driven programming, where tasks are divided into cooperatively-scheduled "handlers" that react to external events, has found pervasive acceptance from high-performance servers to embedded systems as an efficient method for interacting with the world. Unfortunately, the loose coupling of handlers obscures program control flow and interdependencies, making programs hard to debug, maintain, and validate. This research program investigates a new generation of programming language and tool support for event-driven programs constructed out of modular components. As representative test systems, it focuses on Click, a performance-constrained modular software router, and TinyOS, a resource-constrained operating system for embedded wireless sensors. All phases of the programming process are addressed, from the languages used to write event-driven programs, through automated verifiers and analyses that ensure safety properties (such as bounding the latency required to handle an event), to optimizers that reduce code size, optimize system structures, and meet global resource constraints. Next-generation language and tool support will lead to increased confidence in a wide variety of event-driven systems, including Web servers, sensor networks, medical implants, engine control, and fly-by-wire/drive-by-wire systems, and will make this important methodology easier to teach. New compilers and analysis tools will be made publicly available.