Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

Research in PARKAS focuses on the design, semantics, and compilation of programming languages which allow going from parallel deterministic specifications to target embedded code executing on sequential or multi-core architectures. We are driven by the ideal of a mathematical and executable language used both to program and simulate a wide variety of systems, including real-time embedded controllers in interaction with a physical environment (e.g., fly-by-wire, engine control), computationally intensive applications (e.g., video), and compilers that produce provably correct and efficient code.

The team bases its research on the foundational work of Gilles Kahn on the semantics of deterministic parallelism, the theory and practice of synchronous languages and typed functional languages, synchronous circuits, modern (polyhedral) compilation, and formal models to prove the correctness of low-level code running on weak-memory processors.

To realize our research program, we develop languages (Lucid Synchrone , ReactiveML , Lucy-n , Zelus ), compilers (PPCG), contributions to open-source projects (isl, LLVM, gcc, SundialsML), tools to study language semantics (Ott) and to test optimization compilers in the presence of threads (cmmtest), and formalizations in Interactive Theorem Provers of language semantics (Vélus, n-synchrony, quasi-synchrony). These software projects constitute essential “laboratories”: they ground our scientific contributions, guide and validate our research through experimentation, and are an important vehicle for long-standing collaborations with industry.