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Hello all,
[Apologies for multiple postings.]
I am looking for a PhD student who is interested in the analysis of concurrent
or distributed programs, start date in October 2021. A summary of possible
research projects is given below and details about my research group can be
found here<https://vtss.doc.ic.ac.uk>.
The deadline to apply for a PhD position in the Department is **19th March
2021**. A successful UK student will probably be funded through the standard
Departmental competition for funds. A successful EU/overseas student will
probably be funded by a combination of Departmental funding and my funding. In
particular, I have additional funding which means that the EU/overseas students
are able to go into the same competition for funding as the UK students.
Given these uncertain times, we will assess the situation about whether it is
necessary to start the position remotely nearer the time. The good news is that
accommodation rents are currently low due to covid, with people in my group
recently getting some excellent accommodation, and so it is actually quite a
good time to come to London.
Please do not hesitate to contact me directly if interested, cc’ing my
administrator Teresa Carbajo Garcia, cc'd.
Best wishes,
Philippa
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Professor Philippa Gardner FREng
Department of Computing
Imperial College
180 Queen’s Gate
London
SW7 2AZ
Your working day may not be the same as mine. Please do not feel
obliged to reply to this email outside your normal working hours.
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POSSIBLE PROJECTS
Gillian: Concurrency
Gillian [1,1a] is a multi-language platform for compositional symbolic
analysis. It currently supports three flavours of analysis: whole-program
symbolic testing; full verification based on separation logic; and automatic
compositional testing based on bi-abduction. It is underpinned by a core
symbolic execution engine, parametric on the memory model of the target
language, with strong mathematical foundations that unify symbolic testing and
verification. Gillian has been instantiated to C and JavaScript, obtaining
results on real-world code that demonstrate the viability of our unified,
parametric approach.
We have an ambitious project to design and implement Concurrent Gillian. It
involves: changing the core of Gillian to handle concurrency; developing a
Gillian instantiation for a small concurrent While language to explore
different types of concurrency reasoning; developing a Gillian instantiation
for concurrent Rust which will build on the current development of a Gillian
instantiation for sequential Rust; and exploring symbolic testing and
verification for real-world Rust programs.
Concurrency
We have worked for many years on the compositional reasoning about concurrent
programs, introducing fundamental techniques which underpin modern concurrent
separation logics [2,2a]: logical abstraction; logical atomicity; and logical
environment liveness properties. We have applied our reasoning to verify some
of the most advanced concurrent algorithms in the literature. There are several
suitable PhD projects associated with this work: for example, continuing the
work on the foundational theory; applying the work to real-world libraries;
developing prototype analysis tools; or using the Coq-focused Iris project,
whose foundations use some of our theory.
Distribution
We have recently begun to work on weak consistency models for distribution,
developing an interleaving operational semantics for client-observational
behaviour of atomic transactions [5]. Possible PhD projects include: creating a
program logic for distributed atomic transactions (our original motivation for
the work) inspired by our previous work on program logics for concurrency; or
further developing the operational semantics with the aim to provide prototype
tools for proving robustness results and discovering litmus tests.
References
[1] Gillian, Part 1: A Multi-language Platform for Symbolic Execution, Jose
Fragoso Santos, Petar Maksimovic, Sacha-Elie Ayoun and Philippa Gardner,
PLDI'2020. Part 2 on verification and bi-abduction is being written now. We
have given a talk on Gillian at the conference Rebase, associated with
ECOOP/OOPSLA, in November 2020, and at Facebook's Testing and Verification
Symposium (FaceTAV), in December 2020.
[1a] Gillian Verification for JavaScript and C, Petar Maksimovic, Sacha-Elie
Ayoun, Jose Fragoso Santos and Philippa Gardner, submitted, draft available
upon request.
[2] A Perspective on Specifying and Verifying Concurrent Modules, Thomas
Dinsdale-Young, Pedro da Rocha Pinto and Philippa Gardner, Journal of Logical
and Algebraic Methods in Programming, 2018.
[2a] TaDA Live: Compositional Reasoning for Termination of Fine-grained
Concurrent Programs, Emanuele D’Osualdo, Azadeh Farzan, Philippa Gardner and
Julian Sutherland, submitted for journal publication 2020, draft available upon
request.
[3] Data Consistency in Transactional Storage Systems: a Centralised Approach,
Shale Xiong, Andrea Cerone, Azalea Raad and Philippa Gardner, ECOOP'20.
