Page type: project

PSP group at UT Austin;PSP Group at UT Austin;This is the home page for the PSP group in the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at;Austin. PSP stands for Programs,;Specifications and Proofs. The emphasis of the work of our group is to derive;parallel and distributed programs in a rigorous manner. The group is;supervised by Jayadev Misra, who developed the theories; we work on. The research areas are: UNITY,;Powerlists and Seuss.;Current and former members of the group;include:; Jayadev Misra; Will Adams; Al Carruth; Ernie Cohen (graduated 1992); Rajeev Joshi; Markus Kaltenbach (graduated 1996); Edgar Knapp (graduated 1992); Jacob Kornerup; Ingolf Krüger (graduated 1996); Josyula R Rao (graduated 1992); Mark Staskauskas (graduated 1992);Publications;Below we summarize the areas we work in; wherever possible we give links to;papers that are available electronically.; UNITY;UNITY is a programming notation and a logic to reason about parallel and;distributed programs. Unity is presented in the book: J. Misra and K.;M. Chandy, Parallel Program Design: A Foundation,;Addison-Wesley, 1988.;The notes on UNITY is a series of;papers presenting various results about UNITY and its applications. The;notes assumes a basic understanding of the UNITY theory as presented in;Chandy and Misra's book.;Since the publication of the book several improvements have been made in;the theory, some of which are reflected in the notes on UNITY, Jayadev Misra has written a;manuscript for a book that presents the New;UNITY, this includes the introduction of a new temporal operator;co for specifying safety.;See further UNITY references for;references to other papers and implementations.;Markus Kaltenbach is currently writing a;symbolic model checker for;finite state UNITY programs, called the UNITY;Verifier (UV).;Al Carruth has extended the UNITY logic to;include real time aspects of computing and hybrid systems.; Powerlists;Powerlists is a notation for synchronous parallel programs and circuits.;The data structure is a list of length equal to a power of two, with two;different operations for balanced divisions of lists. Many parallel;algorithms have a succinct presentation and simple proofs in the;powerlist notation. Jayadev Misra's paper Powerlists:;A Structure for Parallel Recursion presents the notation and gives;numerous examples of algorithms and proofs of their correctness,;including the Fast Fourier Transform and Batcher's sorting network.;Will Adams has studied how different arithmetic circuits, such as;adders and multipliers, can be specified and proved correct in the;powerlist notation. His paper Verifying adder;circuits using powerlists is available.;Jacob Kornerup has studied how powerlist programs;can be mapped efficiently to different parallel architectures, specially;hypercubes. See his List of;papers for details.; Seuss;Seuss is an offspring of the work on UNITY. It addresses the issue of;program composition, by restricting how program components can;interfere with each other. For an introduction to Seuss, read the Overview of Seuss. A few chapters from;a monograph A;Discipline of Multiprogramming written by Jayadev Misra are also;available. A compiler for Seuss that genrates C++ code and PVM calls;for message communicating networks is described in the thesis An;experiment in compiler design for a concurrent object-based;programming language of Ingolf;Krüger.; FTP site;Many of the above papers can be found in the;PSP ftp-site;Jacob Kornerup;