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Tech talk video: Computers As We Don’t Know Them

August 23rd, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new Galois tech talk video: “Computers As We Don’t Know Them”, presented by Christof Teuscher. More details about the talk are available on the announcement page.

Computers As We Don’t Know Them from Galois Video on Vimeo.

For more videos, please visit http://vimeo.com/channels/galois.

Posted in Tech Talks, Technology, Video | Comments (1)

Tech Talk Video: Developing Good Habits for Bare-Metal Programming

August 11th, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new Galois tech talk video: “Developing Good Habits for Bare-Metal Programming”, presented by Mark Jones. More details about the talk are available on the announcement page.

Developing Good Habits for Bare-Metal Programming from Galois Video on Vimeo.

For more videos, please visit http://vimeo.com/channels/galois.

Posted in Functional Programming, Haskell, Tech Talks, Technology, Video | Comments (0)

Tech talk: Computers As We Don’t Know Them

August 11th, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!

titie:: Computers As We Don’t Know Them (slides, video)
speaker:: Christof Teuscher, PhD; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Portland State University
time:: 10:30am, 17 August 2010
location:
abstract:: Since the beginning of modern computer science some sixty years ago, we are building computers in pretty much the same way. Silicon transistor electronics serves as a physical device, the von Neumann architecture provides a computer design model, while the abstract Turing machine concept supports the theoretical foundations. However, in recent years, unimagined computing devices have seen the light because of advances in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, material science, and neuroscience. Many of these novel devices share the following characteristics: (1) they are made up from massive numbers of simple, stochastic components which (2) are embedded in 2D or 3D space in some disordered way. A grand challenge in consists in developing computing paradigms, design methodologies, formal frameworks, architectures, and tools that allow to reliably compute and efficiently solve problems with such devices. In this talk, I will outline my visionary and long-term research efforts to address the grand challenge of building, organizing, and programming future computing machines. First, I will review exemplary future and emerging computing devices and highlight the particular challenges that arise for performing computations them. I will then delineate potential solutions on how these challenges might be addressed. Self-assembled nano-scale cellular automata (CAs) and random boolean networks (RBNs) will serve as a simple showcase. I will also present the efforts underway to self-assemble massive-scale nanowire-based interconnect fabrics for spatial computers and what the challenges are in terms of computations and communication in such a non-classical system.
bio:: Christof Teuscher currently holds an assistant professor position in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) with joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Systems Science Graduate Program. He also holds an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Dr. Teuscher obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000 and 2004 respectively. His main research interests include emerging computing architectures and paradigms, biologically-inspired computing, complex & adaptive systems, and cognitive science. Teuscher has received several prestigious awards and fellowships. For more information visit: http://www.teuscher-lab.com/christof

Posted in Tech Talks, Technology | Comments (0)

Tech talk video: PReach – A Distributed Murphi-Based Model Checker

August 9th, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new Galois tech talk video: “PReach – A Distributed Murphi-Based Model Checker”, presented by John Erickson. More details about the talk are available on the announcement page.

PReach – A Distributed Murphi-Based Model Checker from Galois Video on Vimeo.

For more videos, please visit http://vimeo.com/channels/galois.

Posted in Formal Methods, Tech Talks, Technology, Video | Comments (0)

Tech Talk Video: Requirement and Performance of Data Intensive, Irregular Applications

August 3rd, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new Galois tech talk video: “Requirement and Performance of Data Intensive, Irregular Applications”, presented by John Feo. More details about the talk are available on the announcement page.

Requirement and Performance of Data Intensive, Irregular Applications from Galois Video on Vimeo.

For more videos, please visit http://vimeo.com/channels/galois.

Posted in Tech Talks, Technology, Video | Comments (0)

Galois Tech Talk Video: Large-Scale Static Analysis at Mozilla

July 9th, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new Galois tech talk video: “Large-Scale Static Analysis at Mozilla”, presented by Taras Glek.
Slides and more details about the talk are available on the announcement page.

Large-Scale Static Analysis at Mozilla from Galois Video on Vimeo.

For more videos, please visit http://vimeo.com/channels/galois.

Posted in Community, Open Source, Tech Talks, Technology, Video | Comments (0)

Tech Talk: Requirements and Performance of Data Intensive, Irregular Applications

July 2nd, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!

Please note the unusual day for this talk: it is on Friday, 9 July 2010

title:

Requirements and Performance of Data Intensive, Irregular Applications (video)

presenter:

Dr. John Feo

time:

10:30am, Friday, 9 July 2010

location:

Galois Inc.
421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA
(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

Abstract:

Many fundamental science, national security, and business applications need to process large volumes of irregular, unstructured data. Data collection and analysis is rapidly changing the way the scientific, national security, and economic communities operate. There are worldwide operational deployments of instruments to detect the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, monitor terrorist cells, and track the movement of illicit goods and services. In the next 15 years 30% of battle-space defense forces will be autonomous with each advanced robotic device carrying dozens of sophisticated sensors collecting, processing, analyzing and transmitting large amounts of data. American economic competitiveness will depend increasingly on the timely analysis of many Petabytes of data collected in diverse computing clouds charting the social and economic behavior of consumers.

Unlike traditional scientific applications based on linear algebra routines, data analytic applications comprise large, integer-based graph computations with irregular data access patterns, low computation to memory access ratios, and high levels of fine grain parallelism that pass data and synchronize frequently. Traditional architectures optimized to run large-scale floating point intensive simulations are inadequate, and more suitable high-end architectures such as the Cray XMT are needed. In this talk I will discuss the programming language, tools, and system requirements for data analytic applications. I will survey the research at PNNL’s Center for Adaptive Supercomputer Software as regards graph analytics. In particular, I will present several key graph algorithms we have developed with an emphasis on structure, use of special hardware features, performance, and scalability.

bio:

Dr. John Feo is the director of the Center for Adaptive Supercomputer Software at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory. Dr. Feo received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. He began his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he managed the Computer Science Group and was the principal investigator of the Sisal Language Project. Dr. Feo then joined Tera Computer Company (now Cray Inc) where he was a principal engineer and product manager for the MTA-1 and MTA-2, the first two generations of the Cray’s multithreaded architecture. After a short two year “sabbatical” at Microsoft where he led a software group developing a next-generation virtual reality platform, he joined PNNL

Dr. Feo’s research interests are parallel programming, graph algorithms, multithreaded architectures, functional languages, and performance studies. He has published extensively in these fields. He has held academic positions at UC Davis and is an adjunct faculty at Washington State University.

Posted in Tech Talks, Technology | Comments (0)

Galois Tech Talks, now on Vimeo!

June 14th, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

For a number of years, Galois Inc. has been organizing technical seminars presented by visiting researchers, Galois engineers, and members of the vibrant Portland technical community. The seminars span a wide variety of topics, ranging from functional programming, formal methods, and compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction. The talks are free and open to the interested public. Announcements of upcoming talks are posted to this blog about a week in advance.

Over the last few months we have received a number of requests to share videos of the talks with the wider community. As a result, we are very pleased to announce the Galois tech talk channel on Vimeo. Recent Galois talks should become available over the next few weeks, followed by future presentations.

Enjoy!

Galois tech talk channel: http://vimeo.com/channels/galois

Posted in Community, Galois News, Tech Talks, Technology, Video | Comments (5)

Tech Talk: Large-Scale Static Analysis at Mozilla

June 3rd, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!

title:: Large-Scale Static Analysis at Mozilla (slides, video)
presenter:: Taras Glek
time:: 10:30 am, 8 June 2010, Tuesday
location:: Galois Inc.
421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA
(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)
abstract:: A competitive browser market requires fast-paced improvements to the codebase. Such improvements may require significant refactoring of large parts of the codebase. Mozilla Firefox is one of the largest open source C++ projects. Unfortunately C++ is a complex language: method overloading, virtual functions, template instantiation, pointer arithmetic, etc reduce developer productivity. Mozilla developed C++ static analysis and refactoring tools to increase developer leverage in C++. Static analysis is done via Dehydra/Treehydra GCC plugins and refactoring is accomplished by extending the Elsa C++ parser. This talk will discuss why Mozilla needs static analysis, why there are so few tools for C++, and specific projects that we’ve embarked on.
bio:: Taras Glek is a software engineer at Mozilla Corporation. He works on static analysis and startup performance. Taras blogs about it at http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/.

Posted in Open Source, Tech Talks, Technology | Comments (4)

Tech Talk: Developing Good Habits for Bare-Metal Programming

May 12th, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!

title: Developing Good Habits for Bare-Metal Programming (slides, video)
presenter: Mark Jones; High Assurance Systems Programming Project (HASP); Portland State University
time: 10:30am, Tuesday, 18 May 2010
location: Galois Inc.
421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA
(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)
abstract: Developers of systems software must often deal with low-level and performance-critical details that are hard to address in high-level programming languages. As a result, much of the systems software that is produced today is written in languages like C and assembly code, without the benefit of more expressive type systems or other features from modern functional programming languages that could help to increase programmer productivity or software quality. In this talk, we present an update on the status of Habit, a dialect of Haskell that we are designing, as part of the HASP project at PSU, to meet the needs of high assurance systems programming. Among other features, Habit provides: mechanisms for fine control over representation of bit-level and memory-based data structures; strong support for both functional and imperative programming; and a flexible type system that allows precise characterization of size and bound information via type level naturals, as well as termination properties resulting from the use of unpointed types.
bio: (from http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/)
Mark Jones is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, USA. His interests include all aspects of programming language design, implementation, and application. He is particularly interested in the use of advanced programming language technologies for systems programming, and in the development and application of expressive type and module systems that support the construction and certification of secure and reliable software systems.

Posted in Formal Methods, Functional Programming, Haskell, Tech Talks, Technology | Comments (2)