-
Inexpensive CPU Monster
Rather than using the commercial cloud, my group tends to run day-to-day jobs on a tiny cluster of machines in my office and then to use Emulab when a serious amount of compute power is required. Recently I upgraded some nodes and thought I’d share the specs for the new machines on the off chance…
-
Instruction Synthesis is Fun and Weird
Synthesis is sort of a hot topic in PL research lately. It basically means “implement a specification automatically.” Of course, at some level this isn’t very different from what compilers have been doing for ages, if we consider the source language program to be the specification, but when we’re doing synthesis the connotation is that…
-
Static Analysis Benchmarks
Many programmers would agree that static analysis is pretty awesome: it can find code defects that are very hard to find using testing and walkthroughs. On the other hand, some scientific validation of the effectiveness of static analysis would be useful. For example, this nice 2004 paper found that when five analyzers were turned loose…
-
Nibble Sort Programming Contest
The problem is to sort the 4-bit pieces of a 64-bit word with (unsigned) smaller values towards the small end of the word. The nibble sort of 0xbadbeef is 0xfeedbba000000000. The function you implement will perform this sorting operation on a buffer of 1024 64-bit integers: I’ll give a small prize to the submitter of…
-
Buying Into Open Source Security
If you were given the opportunity to spend USD 100 million over five years to maximally improve the security of open source software, what would you do? Let’s just assume that the money comes with adequate administrative staff to manage awards and contracts so you can focus on technical issues. A few ideas: Bug bounties,…
-
Testing with Pictures
Testing code is fun and hard and looking at the problem in different ways is always good. Here’s a picture representing the behavior of a saturating subtraction operation, where the horizontal axes represent the inputs and the output is vertical: And here are some of the functions handed in by my students in the fall:…
-
Inversions in Computing
Some computer things change very slowly; for example, my newish desktop at home has a PS/2 port. Other things change rapidly: my 2010 iPad is kind of a stone-age relic now. This kind of differential progress creates some funny inversions. A couple of historical examples: Apparently at one point in the 80s or 90s (this…
-
Souper Results 2
The Souper superoptimizer has made some progress since my last post about it. We wrote compiler drivers that usually reduce the problem of building a project with Souper to make CC=sclang CXX=sclang++. Souper now uses Redis to cache optimizations so that even if the initial build of a program using Souper is slow, subsequent builds…
-
Partial Evaluation and Immutable Servers
Although I haven’t figured out exactly what immutability means for a server (I’m probably just being picky) the general idea of rebuilding a system from spec rather than evolving it with one-off hacks is very appealing. Lately I’ve been thinking about what could be accomplished if the system compiler were able to take advantage of…
-
Inward vs. Outward Facing Research
One of the things I like to think about while watching research talks is whether the work faces inward or outward. Inward facing research is mostly concerned with itself. A paper that uses most of its length to prove a theorem would be an example, as would a paper about a new operating system that…