Brigham Young University
Grant: $125,533 - National Science Foundation - Aug. 1, 2009
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Award Description: This project contributes tools to engineer future information processing systems so that they operate reliably and efficiently. Given that many of these systems will be produced on single micro-chips, and given the increasing demands for rapid turn-around times of designs, manufacturers are standardizing on methods by which the central processing units in these chips may communicate. Such standards will eliminate duplication of labor and allow components originating from different manufacturers to be mixed and matched. Since such standards will govern the construction of millions of future systems, one has to apply rigorous engineering principles accompanied by mathematically sound analysis methods to ensure that the standards are not flawed. This is one of the important goals of this project. The other key goals are to ensure that the manufacturing of these systems proceeds as per the standard definition and that testing methods to check the correctness of manufacture will be in place in a timely manner. The complementary strengths of the principal investigators, one of whom is from the School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the other from Brigham Young University in Provo Utah will help drive this project forward in unique ways. The first year of this project will investigate rigorous specification methods for this standard called MCAPI. The second year will involve the research design of a variety of analysis tools for programs written using MCAPI. The third year will involve pilot testing of our tools at the manufacturer sites of systems on chips.
Project Description: We summarize the activities over the third quarter of 2009 as follows: • We have implemented a prototype verification tool for MCAPI applications based on run-time verification techniques in collaboration with Ganesh Gopalakrishnan’s research group at the University of Utah. The work is accepted for publication in the proceedings of the Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design Conference (FMCAD), 2009. A follow-on piece of work is appearing in the proceedings of the IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test (HLDVT) Workshop, 2009. • We have created an initial formal specification of a portion of the connectionless message passing interface in MCAPI. We are visiting with Jim Holt, Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Freescale Semiconductor, concerning the needs of the MCAPI specification and clarifying finer points of the specification. In the fourth quarter, we expect the initial formal specification to be combined with a source-to-source translator to create a tool for putative queries on API scenarios. We are also trying to enhance the MCC tool to further reduce the complexity of the verification to scale to larger application programs. Both works are targeted for publication in the first quarter of 2010.
Jobs Summary: Two new Student Research Assistant jobs were created (Total jobs reported: 0)
Project Status: Less Than 50% Completed
This award's data was last updated on Aug. 1, 2009. Help expand these official descriptions using the wiki below.
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