UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Software Crisis and Coordination Programming: A Strategic View" Professor Alex Shafarenko (Compilation Technology and Computer Architecture Group, University of Hertfordshire) 27 February 2013 (Wednesday) 1 pm -2 pm Hatfield, College Lane Campus * * Lecture Theatre LC108 * * Everyone is Welcome to Attend Refreshments will be available Abstract: The software sector is somewhat similar to investment banking even though the periods of vigorous growth and crises of the former may seem less spectacular to the man in the street than those of the latter. Curiously, one of those crises (or rather a spell of stagnation) is happening in both sectors simultaneously at present time -- there's the bad news! The reason for the software crisis is not a failure but rather an astounding success of the new hardware: our ability to place many processor cores on a single chip, the amazing performance of specialised multiprocessors, such as GPUs, and the new flexible architectures that include FPGAs. Not to mention the huge distributed systems where the limits of computing power are set almost exclusively by the system's ability to dissipate heat and recover from unavoidable hardware faults. Software has survived for decades in a nice protected world where machines executed instructions perfectly reliably in a single sequence without running the risk of melting their circuits, and where programmers concerned themselves solely with beautiful abstractions of various degrees of formality. No more. The period of confusion and heightened expectations is over. The new hardware cannot be ignored or handled automatically by operating systems. Now the typical scenario in industry is an overworked programmer trying to utilise a multicore wonder by engaging copious support libraries, profiling tools and other forms of modern voodoo, which, even when they work, necessitate product redesign as soon as the platform receives its next "improvement". Unsurprisingly all eyes are now on compilers and languages. In this talk I will introduce coordination programming and will explain what role it plays in finding the way out of the current software crisis. I will present our EU-funded work with large industrial players in the software sector: Thales, Philips and SAP. The present direction of coordination programming will be discussed in the context of our forthcoming collaboration with Intel. --------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk