[Brown CS Talks] Brown CS Seminar: Sanjeev Kumar in Lubrano on 3/22/02 at noon

[talks-admin@list.cs.brown.edu]

			      CS Seminar
		  
		  The Department of Computer Science
			   BROWN UNIVERSITY

			      
			       presents

			    Sanjeev Kumar

			    
			 Princeton University
				
		    Friday, March 22, 2002 at noon
	       Lubrano Conference Room (CIT 4th floor)
	       Refreshments will be served at 11:45 am

			       
	       ESP: A Language for Programmable Devices


			       Abstract

This talk presents the design and implementation of Event-driven
State-machines Programming (ESP)---a language for programmable
devices. In traditional languages, like C, using event-driven state
machines forces a tradeoff that requires giving up ease of programming
and reliability to achieve high performance. ESP is designed to
provide all of these three properties simultaneously.

ESP provides a comprehensive set of features to support development of
compact and modular programs. The ESP compiler compiles the programs
into two targets---a C file that can be used to generate efficient
firmware for the device, and a model that can be used by a
model-checking verifier like Spin to extensively test the firmware.

As a case study, we reimplemented VMMC firmware that runs on Myrinet
network interface cards using ESP. We found that ESP simplifies the
task of programming with event-driven state machines. It required an
order of magnitude fewer lines of code than the earlier
implementation. We also found that model-checking verifiers like Spin
can be used to effectively debug the firmware. Our measurements show
that the performance impact on applications of using ESP is small.


		     Host:  Professor Steve Reiss