At the end of August, the Formal Methods research group at CWI acquired two EU projects: Envisage and Upscale. At CWI, both FP7 projects each comprise two PhD students for three years. Envisage, starting on 1 October, investigates the development of new software techniques for cloud applications, in a consortium together with innovative industries. Its total funding is 3.18 million euros, for eight partners. Upscale, which starts on 1 February 2014 and has a funding of 1.76 million euros for four academic partners, will study the development of new software techniques for manycore applications.
Envisage
Today, reliability and control of virtualized resources are barriers to the industrial adoption of cloud computing. Envisage aims at developing a resource-oriented design-by-contract methodology to efficiently deliver virtualized services. This methodology addresses two major challenges: the leveraging of contracts and service-level agreements (SLA) into programming models, and the leveraging of resource management into the early phases of service design.
Envisage will create a practical open-source framework to develop SLA-aware services, with highly automated analyses using formal methods. The methodology and framework will allow services to be delivered in a more effective, efficient, and reliable manner than today, accelerating the development cycle and lowering the operational costs for innovative networked services that make use of cloud computing. Envisage could profoundly influence business ICT strategies in all sectors. More information: http://www.envisage-project.eu/
Upscale
Manufacturers are moving from multicore chips to manycore chips with up to a million independent processors on the same silicon real estate. However, software cannot yet benefit. The advent of manycore chips not only threatens to make the object-oriented model obsolete, but also the accumulated know-how of a generation of programmers.
The Upscale vision is to provide a means for industry to efficiently develop applications that seamlessly scale to the available parallelism of manycore chips without abandoning the object-oriented paradigm and the associated software engineering methodologies. The project aims to realise this vision by a breakthrough in how parallelism and concurrency are integrated into programming languages, which will profoundly impact software development for the manycore chips of the future. More information: http://www.upscale-project.eu/
More information: Formal Methods group at CWI
Picture: Shutterstock
