Consider the following multiplication algorithm, coded in Mostek 6502 Assembler:

 LDX #8 ; 1; load X immediate with the 8LDA #0 ; 2; load A immediate with the 0CLC ; 3; set C to 0LOOP ROR F1 ; 4; rotate F1 right circular through CBCC ZCOEF ; 5; branch to ZCOEF if C = 0CLC ; 6; set C to 0ADC F2 ; 7; set A to A+F2+C and C to the carryZCOEF ROR A ; 8; rotate A right circular through CROR LOW ; 9; rotate LOW right circular through CDEX ;10; set X to X-1BNE LOOP ;11; branch to LOOP if Z = 0

This program comes from Wilfred Legato’s paper “A Weakest Precondition Model for Assembly Language Programs.” It multiplies the contents of the memory locations F1 and F2; each of which is 8-bits wide. The result is stored in the accumulator register A and the memory location LOW, each of which is, again, 8-bits. It holds that:

 F1 * F2 = 256 * A + LOW

when the algorithm terminates, correctly handling the overflow. It is worth spending a moment or two pondering how this algorithm works; it is not at all obvious how the multiplication is done!Legato’s challenge  (as  referred to in ACL2 circles) is to prove a deep-embedding of Legato’s algorithm correct with respect to a Mostek simulator coded in ACL2. We do not attempt to solve  Legato’s challenge in Cryptol. We are merely interested in coding and proving that Legato’s multiplier is correct in Cryptol. Our interest stems from the fact that Legato’s algorithm is a truly interesting multiplier on its own right, and we would like to make sure that a straightforward encoding of it in Cryptol can be proven correct automatically by Cryptol’s verification tools. And of course, it’s just too hard to pass up on the opportunity to  pay respect to the Mostek chip that powered the Commodore 64‘s and Atari 800XL‘s of our childhood.

A shallow embedding

The Cryptol solution to Legato’s problem will be a fairly shallow encoding of the multiplier, together with an automated proof of correctness. We choose to do a shallow encoding here since it allows us to focus on the multiplication algorithm itself, as opposed to the particulars of the underlying Mostek chip. Theorem proving based solutions (such as those given by ACL2 folks) will rightly pursue a deeper embedding of the algorithm and the Mostek architecture in general. Cryptol is not particularly suitable for deep embeddings. Representing Mostek assembly instructions directly as Cryptol functions is a much simpler and straightforward choice.Looking at Legato’s multiplier above, we will represent each instruction (from 1 to 11) as a simple state transformer, taking a simplified representation of the Mostek machine state as input and delivering a new one. We will only represent parts of the state that matter for our problem. The following Cryptol type declaration succinctly captures what we need:

 type Mostek = ( [8] // F1, [8] // F2, [8] // A, [8] // X, [8] // LOW, Bit // C (Carry), Bit // Z (Zero));

Using this state representation, each instruction in the program can be modeled as a  state transformer:

 type Instruction = Mostek -> Mostek;

This takes care of the data-flow aspect of the embedding; but the question of how to model control-flow remains. We will simply use the host-language’s control-flow features, using the quintessential functional idiom: by calling functions! This is actually easier done than said, and here’s our embedding of the first instruction of the program:

 // step1: LDX #8; load X immediate with the integer 8.step1 : Instruction;step1 (f1, f2, a, _, l, c, z) =step2 (f1, f2, a, 8, l, c, z);

Let’s spend a minute explaining this in detail. The first step in the program loads the register X with the immediate value 8. Using our state-transformer model, our step1 function will receive a Mostek state (consisting of the “current” values of F1, F2, A, X, LOW, CARRY, and ZERO). The “effect” of this instruction is to put the value 8 into the register X, leaving everything else the same. Once this is done, the control goes to the next instruction, which we model by calling the function step2 (which is yet to be defined).In this fashion, we can shallowly embed all the instructions in Legato’s multiplier, using Cryptol’s native functions and control-flow features. Of course, this is hardly a new idea, being the essence of the whole domain-specific embedded language saga: Using a rich host-language to “fake” other languages.Following the recipe set by step1, it is easy to model the next two instructions:

 // step2: LDA #0; load A immediate with the integer 0.step2 : Instruction;step2 (f1, f2, _, x, l, c, z) =step3 (f1, f2, 0, x, l, c, z);// step3: CLC; set C to 0 (Note the use of Bit False here)step3 : Instruction;step3 (f1, f2, a, x, l, _, z) =step4 (f1, f2, a, x, l, False, z);

Step 4 is equally easy in terms of control flow, but is tricky in terms of operation. After some head-scratching, one figures out that the term “rotate F1 right circular through C” means put the right-most bit of F1 in C, and put C in the first position of F1. A bizarre thing to do indeed, but that’s the beauty of Legato’s multiplier. The Cryptol translation is almost literal:

// step4: LOOP ROR F1; rotate F1 right circular through C.step4 : Instruction;step4 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z) =step5 (f1', f2, a, x, l, b0, z)where {[b0 b1 b2 b3 b4 b5 b6 b7] = f1;f1' = [b1 b2 b3 b4 b5 b6 b7 c];};

The use of pattern matching in getting the bits out of f1, and the construction of the new value of f1 is idiomatic Cryptol. There’s one little catch though: Apparently Mostek was a big-endian machine, having a most-significant-bit-first representation. Cryptol is little-endian. So, instead of rotating the bits to right, we  rotate them left.The fifth instruction is the first time where we use Cryptol’s control-flow to model the Mostek jump instruction:

 // step5 : BCC ZCOEF; branch to ZCOEF if C = 0.// ZCOEF is step8 in our encodingstep5 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z)= if c then step6 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z)else step8 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z);

In this case, we simply receive a state, and depending on the value of the carry bit (C), we either go to the next step (i.e., no jump); or go to the ZCOEF instruction, which is going to be step-8 in our model. Easy as pie!Step-6 is a replica of Step-3, clearing the carry bit:

 // step6: CLC; set C to 0step6 (f1, f2, a, x, l, _, z) =step7 (f1, f2, a, x, l, False, z);

Step-7 is the most compute intensive part of the algorithm. The Cryptol encoding is a bit complicated due to the need to determine if there was a carry in the addition. Since all Cryptol arithmetic is modular, we are forced to do the computation at an extended bit-size. Otherwise, the modeling of the ADC instruction is quite straightforward:

 // step7: ADC F2; set A to A+F2+C and C to the carry.step7 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z) =step8 (f1, f2, a', x, l, c', z')where {// 8-bit "modular" resulta' = a + f2 + (if c then (1:[8]) else (0:[8]));// Was there a carry? Check that "real"// result is larger than 255a'Large : [9];a'Large =(a # zero) // extend a by adding zero bits+ (f2 # zero) // same for f2+ (if c then (1:[9]) else (0:[9]));c' = a'Large > (255:[9]);// set the zero flagz' = a' == 0;};

The Cryptol idiom x # zero simply represents the value x extended on the right with 0 bits. (Remember that Cryptol is little-endian, hence the addition of zero bits on the right does not change the value.) Due to the polymorphic type of the value zero, the result has any number of bits larger than equal to the original bit-size of x. (Since we only need 9-bits i
n this case, we could have coded the same via the expression x # [False], but the former expression is more idiomatic Cryptol.)Steps 8 and 9 are similar to Step-4, using A and LOW instead of F1, respectively:

 // step8 : ZCOEF ROR A; rotate A right circular through C.step8 : Instruction;step8 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z) =step9 (f1, f2, a', x, l, a0, z)where {[a0 a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7] = a;a' = [a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7 c];};// step9 : ROR LOW; rotate LOW right circular through C.step9 : Instruction;step9 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z) =step10 (f1, f2, a, x, l', l0, z)where {[l0 l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 l7] = l;l' = [l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 l7 c];};

Step-10 simply decrements X, setting the ZERO flag appropriately:

 // step10: DEX; set X to X-1step10 : Instruction;step10 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z) =step11 (f1, f2, a, x', l, c, x'==0)where x' = x-1;

Finally, step-11 either jumps back to the top of the loop (step-4), or finishes the algorithm:

 // step11: BNE LOOP; branch to LOOP if Z = 0.// LOOP is step4 in our encodingstep11 : Instruction;step11 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z)= if zthen (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z) // done!else step4 (f1, f2, a, x, l, c, z);

From a control-flow perspective, we indicate the end of the algorithm by simply returning the final Mostek state. It is worthwile at this point to go through the Cryptol embeddings of the instructions to see how they match-up to the Mostek assembly given by Legato.

Extracting the multiplier

Having coded Legato’s multiplier as a sequence of state transformers, we can simply call the function step1 to use it with an appropriate state. The following helper function simplifies this task for us, by loading the registers F1 and F2, and extracting the high and low bits at the end:

legato : ([8], [8], Mostek) -> ([8], [8]);legato (f1, f2, st) = (hi, lo)where {// get the relevant parts// to construct the starting state(_, _, A, X, LOW, C, Z) = st;// Run legato multiplier;// final A is hi; and final LOW is low(_, _, hi, _, lo, _, _) =step1 (f1, f2, A, X, LOW, C, Z);};

Note that legato still takes the starting machine state st as an argument. Legato’s claim (which we will shortly prove) is that the algorithm works correctly no matter what the initial state is, hence it is important to be explicit about the starting state.To see legato in action, let’s just run it on a simple input:

 legato> legato (12, 93, (9, 42, 3, 8, 1, False, True))(4, 92)

where I just made up the initial state by plugging in some random values. If Legato is right, then it must be the case that

 12 * 93 = 256 * 4 + 92

correctly computing the high and low bytes. And voila! Both sides equal 1116. Magic!

Correctness

If you do believe in magic,  you can stop reading now. But I suspect most readers of the Galois blog will be looking for something more concrete. Surely, we must be able to give a better argument than claiming witchcraft for the correctness of our implementation.Let us first formally capture what we mean by “correct,” by writing a Cryptol theorem that expresses our intuitive expectation:

theoremlegatoIsCorrect: {x y st}. x' * y' == 256 * hi' + lo'where { (hi, lo) = legato (x, y, st);hi', lo', x', y' : [16];hi' = hi # zero;lo' = lo # zero;x' = x # zero;y' = y # zero};

Here’s the English reading of this theorem: “For all values of x, y, and st, if we run legato on these values and get the results hi and lo, then, it’ll be the case that x * y = 256 * hi + lo.” The only caveat is that we have to do arithmetic operations over 16 bit values (instead of 8), to make sure the theorem statement correctly captures the intended mathematical meaning. (Recall that all Cryptol arithmetic is modular with respect to the bit-size involved.) Hence, we simply add extra zero‘s at the end to enlarge the arguments to 16 bits. Note that, we do not have to assert that the value of lo is at most 255; this is automatically guaranteed by the fact that it is an 8-bit value. Cryptol’s bit-precise type system saves the day!

Verification

Here’s what happens when I run cryptol on the file containing the above theorem:

$ cryptol legato.cryCryptol version 1.8.5, Copyright (C) 2004-2009 Galois, Inc.www.cryptol.netType :? for helpLoading "legato.cry".. Checking types.. Processing.. Done!*** Auto quickchecking 1 theorem.*** Checking "legatoIsCorrect" ["legato.cry", line 147, col 1]Checking case 100 of 100 (100.00%)100 tests passed OK[Coverage: 3.47e-14%. (100/288230376151711744)]

When Cryptol sees a theorem declaration in a loaded file, it automatically performs a quick-check run to provide feedback on its validity. In this case, Cryptol automatically created 100 random test values for the theorem and checked that each one of them satisfied the statement. This is a quick way of getting feedback on the correctness of theorems, courtesy of Cryptol at no additonal cost to the user!While the quick-check run is promising, the coverage info indicates that we’ve barely scratched the surface. The entire state space in this case has 58 bits (8 each for x and y, plus the starting arbitrary state of the Mostek machine costing us an extra 42 bits; for a total of 58). The total number of possible inputs is, therefore, 2⁵⁸ or 288230376151711744. This is a huge number: If you had a computer that run 1-billion (10⁹) test cases every second, it’d still take you over 9 years to go through all possible inputs!Of course, we can do better. Cryptol’s theorem proving environment uses modern equivalence-checkers to prove such theorems automatically, at the push of a (virtual) button:

 legato> :prove legatoIsCorrectQ.E.D.

And there, we’ve proved that our implementation of Legato’s multiplier is indeed correct for all possible inputs! (The above proof takes about 2.5 minutes to complete on my 3-year old MacBook Pro, using abc as the underlying equivalence checker in Cryptol’s symbolic mode. I should also note that the symbolic mode is only available in the full Cryptol release, for which free licenses are available.)

Closing thoughts

I must emphasize that we are not advocating Cryptol as a platform for doing proofs of algorithm correctness. Modern theorem provers such as ACL2, Coq, or Isabelle are the leading tools in this regard. (In particular, the logic behind Cryptol’s automated theorem prover is much less expressive, for starters.) Where Cryptol shines is in its restricted attention to bit-vectors and data-flow algorithms (cryptography being a prime application area), and it turns out that automated equivalence-checking based techniques do perform rather well for such problems. Our shallow embedding of Legato’s multiplier and the automated proof-of-correctness is a case in point.There is one more important point to make. While push-button provers are indispensable in industrial practice, the final Q.E.D. you get from an interactive theorem prover such as ACL2 or Isabelle is much more satisfactory. For instance, we can hardly claim that the above proof increased our understanding of Legato’s algorithm in any sense, it just made us really believe it. I’m willing to bet that anyone who goes through a similar proof in ACL2 or Isabelle would have a much higher chance of having their “aha!” moment, where everything just sinks in…On the practical side, however, nothing beats the fully-automated Q.E.D., especially when your boss is breathing down your neck!

Download

The Cryptol file containing Legato’s multiplier and the correctness theorem is here. The Cryptol toolset licenses are freely available at www.cryptol.net.

The July 7th Galois Tech Talk will be delivered by Ivan Sutherland, titled “The Fleet Architecture”

• Date: Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
• Time: 10:30am – 11:30am
• Location: Galois, Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)Portland, OR 97204

Slides are now available.Abstract: This talk describes a radically different architecture for computing called Fleet. Fleet accepts the limitations to computing imposed by physics: moving data around inside a computer costs more energy, more delay, and more chip area than the arithmetic and logical operations ordinarily called “computing.” Fleet puts the programmer firmly in charge of the most costly resource, communication, instead of in charge of the arithmetic and logical resources that are now almost free. Fleet treats arithmetic and logical operations as side effects of where the programmer sends data.Fleet achieves high performance through fine grain concurrency. Everything Fleet does is concurrent at the lowest level; programmers who wish sequentiality must program it explicitly. Fleet presents a stark contrast to today’s multi-core machines in which programmers seek concurrency in an inherently sequential environment.The Fleet architecture uses a uniform switch fabric to simplify chip design. A few thousand identical copies of a programmable interface connect a thousand or so repetitions of basic arithmetic, logical, input-output, and storage units to the switch fabric. The uniform switch fabric and its identical programmable interfaces replace many of the hard parts of designing the computing elements themselves.Both software and FPGA simulators of a Fleet system are available at UC Berkeley. Berkeley students have written a variety of Fleet programs; their work helped to define what the programmable interface between computing and communication must do. A simple compiler now produces the programs required at source and destination to provide flow-controlled communication. We expect work on a higher-level language to appear soon as a PhD dissertation.A recent 90 nanometer TSMC test chip, called Infinity, demonstrated switch fabric performance at about 4 GHz. A new test chip, called Marina, has just gone out for fabrication. Marina will test the programmable interface, and if successful, will give us confidence to build a complete Fleet. We seek participation from sponsors, programmers, and designers of basic computation elements.Bio: Ivan Sutherland is a Visiting Scientist at Portland State University where he and Marly Roncken have recently established the “Asynchronous Research Center” (ARC). The ARC occupies both physical and intellectual space half way between the Computer Science (CS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) departments at the university. The ARC seeks to free designers from the tyranny of the clock by developing better tools and teaching methods for design of self-timed systems. Prior to moving to Portland, Ivan spent 25 years as a Fellow and Vice President at Sun Microsystems. A graduate of Carnegie Tech, Ivan got his PhD at MIT in 1963 and has taught at Harvard, University of Utah, and Caltech.Dr. Sutherland received the 1988 Turing Award, for his pioneering work in the field of computer graphics.

Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities. The talks are open and free. An RSVP is not required, but feel free to contact the organizer with questions and comments.

Galois, Inc., a Portland, Oregon research and development company, has been awarded two Phase I Small Business Innovative Research contracts. Galois will be engaging with the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security on innovative technology solutions.

DHS Topic: Highly Scalable Identity Management Tools

Galois has been granted a Phase I SBIR from the Department of Homeland Security to develop a reusable identity management metasystem which will be designed foundationally to support government certification for deployment across agency boundaries, focusing on open standards, secure development, and a cross-domain design.The Department of Homeland Security’s charter has a fundamental requirement to collaborate with other government agencies. Secure collaboration on this scale requires strong identity management which can “vouch for” DHS personnel working with other agencies and makes it possible to provide DHS resources to individuals in other agencies whose work requires it.Anticipated Benefits: This work will provide an opportunity to deploy standard trusted components in a variety of agencies, each of which can continue to maintain its own method of managing identity and authorization. Agencies can share information based on this layer, which will evolve to support a wide variety of needs.Potential commercial applications: Compliance with government standards of trustworthiness in software used for critical purposes, along with a user-centric approach to identity management, can enable Internet users to merge their many usernames and passwords, allow critical transactions to be executed with a higher degree of trust, and help bring about an environment where e-voting increases voters’ trust in the validity of the outcome of elections.

DOE Topic: Grid 2.0: Collaboration and Sharing on the Grid

Galois has been granted a Phase I SBIR from the Department of Energy to implement a Web 2.0 collaboration system based on Grid technologies. Galois’ system will allow dispersed scientific teams to collaborate effectively on large amounts of data produced by collections of networked computers.Grid computing makes accessible significant computational and data resources to distributed teams of scientific researchers. In doing so, it also poses a challenge: How do distributed teams collaborate effectively with these resources?The problem is determining how best to apply social and collaboration software techniques to improve the efficiency of collaboration between distributed teams working on grid systems.Potential Commercial Applications: Grid computing is inherently social in the sense of involving multiple, loosely connected parties. Social collaboration in the area of large datasets is relevant to industrial and academic scientists.

About Galois, Inc.

Galois is a research and development company with a strong drive to transition technology from research into practice in the commercial and government sphere. Located in downtown Portland, Galois is a company of around 35 employees, including software developers, project managers, and business development personnel. Galois has experience in programming language design and compiler implementation, secure web application development, secure operating system development, and several other fields. Since its founding in 1999, Galois has been funded for R&D by members of the Intelligence Community and the DoD.  Read more about Galois’ research and technology on their web site: www.galois.com.

The June 30th Galois Tech Talk will be delivered by Brian Huffman, titled “Verifying Stream Fusion with Isabelle/HOLCF”

• Date: Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
• Time: 10:30am – 11:30am
• Location: Galois, Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)Portland, OR 97204

Slides from the talk.Abstract: Stream fusion is a system for removing intermediate data structures from Haskell programs that manipulate lists.  Formal verification of such libraries requires very precise modeling in a theorem prover, to avoid strictness-related bugs.In this talk I will present a formalization of the stream fusion library in Isabelle/HOLCF, a theorem proving environment designed especially for reasoning about functional programs.  I will show how to prove the correctness of various stream functions using “fixed-point induction”, a powerful reasoning principle for general recursive functions.Bio: Brian Huffman is a PhD student in Computer Science at Portland State  University, working with advisor John Matthews. He studies formal reasoning with  the Isabelle theorem prover, specializing in formalized mathematics and semantics of functional languages. He is currently the maintainer of Isabelle/HOLCF, a logic for domain theory.

Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities. The talks are open and free. An RSVP is not required, but feel free to contact the organizer with questions and comments.

The June 23rd Galois Tech Talk will be delivered by John Launchbury, titled “A Newbie’s Exploration of Separation Logic.”

• Date: Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
• Time: 10:30am – 11:30am
• Location: Galois, Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)Portland, OR 97204

Abstract: I was just privileged to be in a Separation Logic Tutorial, given by its inventor, John Reynolds. Separation logic allows descriptions of storage and other resources concisely, providing a novel system for reasoning about imperative programs with shared mutable data structures. Recent years have seen a flurry of activity in Separation Logic, extending it to apply from shared-variable concurrency to permission based access control mechanisms. In this informal chalk-talk I will introduce the basics of Separation Logic, providing an overview of the fundamental notions of proof techniques.Bio: John Launchbury is the CTO of Galois, Inc. Prior to founding Galois in 1999, John conducted research and instructed in Computer Science and Engineering at the Oregon Graduate Institute School of Science and Engineering at OHSU. John received First Class Honors in Mathematics from Oxford University in 1985. He holds a Ph.D. in Computing Science from University of Glasgow and won the British Computer Society’s distinguished dissertation prize.

Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities. The talks are open and free. An RSVP is not required, but feel free to contact the organizer with questions and comments.

The June 16th Galois Tech Talk will be delivered by Trevor Elliott, titled “Orc in Haskell.”

• Date: Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
• Time: 10:30am – 11:30am
• Location: Galois, Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)Portland, OR 97204

Abstract: Concurrency is difficult to realize successfully. The Orc language tackles this problem by introducing explicit concurrency as part of its core. It presents a clean, and somewhat monadic, style of programming that should look familiar to Haskell users. I will give a quick introduction to the Orc language, using several examples to motivate its use. Following this introduction, a monadic Haskell embedding of the major features will be presented, bringing a type system to Orc.Bio: Trevor Elliott is a member of the technical staff at Galois, Inc.  His interests center around functional programming, and the effective use of type systems.Slides are available for download.Update: the source is now available on Hackage (though changed from the version presented at this talk).

Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities. The talks are open and free. An RSVP is not required, but feel free to contact the organizer with questions and comments.

The June 9th Galois Tech Talk will be delivered by Jim Grundy titled “A Taste of DDT.”

• Date: Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
• Time: 10:30am – 12:00 noon
• Location: Galois, Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)Portland, OR 97204

Abstract: DDT is a partial implementation of the directed testing approach to test generation. The presentation will likely interest you if you are interested in how directed testing works, or what it is like to use in practice.This seminar presents a rational reconstruction of an experience of using DDT to test a rather rich FIFO/list module implemented in C. The module in question is about 1500 lines of code with a dozen or so entry points. The presentation walks through the user experience of writing and running a first naïve test harness for the module, finding and correcting issues in the code, up to a final declaration of victory.The presentation is rather long, about 1.5 hours, but takes the form of a gently paced walk through a user experience, and as such is rather less taxing on the concentration that you might expect for a talk of its duration.Bio: Jim Grundy is a research scientist with Intel Corporation.  His interests include functional programming, mechanized and interactive reasoning and their application to establishing the correctness of hardware and software systems.

Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities. The talks are open and free. An RSVP is not required, but feel free to contact the organizer with questions and comments.

We have a new position paper on the use of EDSLs (LwDSLs) for verification and validation of unmanned vehicle avionics, written jointly with John van Enk of DornerWorks, recently presented at a mixed-criticality architecture conference. (Download) :: PDF

Lee Pike, Don Stewart, John Van EnkCPS Week 2009 Workshop on Mixed CriticalityRoadmap to Evolving UAV Certification

We outline a new approach to the verification and validation (V & V) of safety-critical avionics based on the use of executable lightweight domain specific languages – domain-specific languages hosted directly in an existing high-level programming language. We provide examples of LwDSLs used in industry today, and then we describe the advantages of LwDSLs in V & V. We argue the approach promises substantial automation and cost-reduction in V & V.

Achronix Semiconductor, maker of the world’s fastest FPGAs, today announced (.pdf) the availability of new, high-performance AES IP cores for its Speedster^TM 1.5 GHz family FPGAs.These high-performance 128-bit key size AES core are targeted at 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps, and 100 Gbps applications have been designed and built by Signali, a Galois spinoff focusing on custom cores targetting computationally intensive algorithms, fixed-function DSP and cryptographic applications. Signali uses their Quattro™ compiler suite to transform high-level descriptions of data-intensive functions, such as AES into high-performance RTL.Read the full story.

Galois has been building systems in Haskell for the past decade. This talk describes some of what we’ve learned about in-the-large, commercial Haskell programming in that time. (Download slides :: .pdf).

• When and where we use Haskell
• Correctness, productivity, scalabilty, maintainability
• What language features we like: types, purity, types, abstractions, types, concurrency, types!
• The Haskell toolchain: FFI, HPC, Cabal, compiler, libraries, build systems, etc.
• Being a commercial entity in a largely open source community

This talk was presented Monday 20th April at λondon HUG.