949-824-9127

Concurrency and Communication: Lessons from the SHIM Project

Speaker Dr. Stephen A. Edwards,
Columbia University
CECS Host Professor Tony Givargis
Location Donald Bren Hall (DBH) 4011
Date & Time November 18, 2009
Refreshments at 10:30 am, Lecture begins at 11:00am
Abstract Describing parallel hardware and software is difficult, especially in an embedded setting. Five years ago, we started the SHIM project to address this challenge by developing a programming language for hardware/software systems. The resulting language describes asynchronously running processes that has the useful property of scheduling-independence: the I/O of a SHIM program is not affected by any scheduling choices. I will present a history of the SHIM project with a focus on the key things we have learned along the way.
Biography Stephen A. Edwards received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1992, and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees, also in Electrical Engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the Computer Science Department of Columbia University in New York, which he joined in 2001 after a three-year stint with Synopsys, Inc., in Mountain View, California. His research interests include embedded system design, domain-specific languages, and compilers.