Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

The goal of the project is the design, semantics and compilation of languages for the implementation of provably safe and efficient computing systems. We are driven by the ideal of a unique source code used both to program and simulate a wide variety of systems, including (1) embedded real-time controllers (e.g., fly-by-wire, engine control); (2) computationally intensive applications (e.g., video); (3) the simulation of (a possibly huge number of) embedded systems in close interaction (e.g., simulation of electrical or sensor networks, train tracking). All these applications share the need for formally defined languages used both for simulation and the generation of target code. For that purpose, we design languages and experiment with compilers that transform mathematical specifications of systems into target code, that may execute on parallel (multi-core) architectures.

Our research team draws inspiration and focus from the simplicity and complementarity of the data-flow model of Kahn process networks, synchronous concurrency, and the expression of the two in functional languages. To reach our goal, we plan to leverage a large body of formal principles: language design, semantics, type theory, concurrency models (including recent works on the formalisation of relaxed memory models), synchronous circuits and algorithms (code generation, optimization, polyhedral compilation).