Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started with the question: what would software look like if it were designed from scratch with an emphasis on dependability and robustness? We are trying to answer this question by building on modern programming languages and tools to develop a new system architecture and operating system (named Singularity). The resulting system differs from other systems in a number of respects. It is written almost entirely in a safe programming language (C#) and it does not rely on hardware for process isolation. These design choices led to a system architecture that is more resilient and that supports specification and verification at many levels of abstraction.

Bio:

James Larus is a Research Area Manager for programming languages and tools at Microsoft Research. I joined Microsoft Research as a Senior Researcher in 1998 to start and, for five years, lead the Software Productivity Tools (SPT) group. Before joining Microsoft, I was an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I co-led the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel research project with Professors Mark Hill and David Wood. This project investigated new approaches to simulating, building, and programming parallel shared-memory computers. In addition, my research covered a number of areas: new and efficient techniques for measuring and recording executing programs’ behavior, tools for analyzing and manipulating compiled and linked programs, programming languages, tools for verifying program correctness, compiler analysis and optimization, and custom cache coherence protocols. I received my PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989.

Thursday, November 9, 2006

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm

Wu & Chen Auditorium

101 Levine Hall