[Colloq] **HIRING TALK** MONDAY, MAY 6 **12:00pm**

[Rachel Bates]

College of Computer Science Colloquium
presents:
Sanjeev Kumar

who will speak on:
ESP: A Language for Programmable Devices


Monday, May 6, 2002
12:00pm
149 Cullinane Hall
Northeastern University


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:
Rajmohan Rajaraman