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Fred B. Schneider
Fred B. Schneider
Professor
PhD State Univ. of N.Y., Stony Brook, 1978
Techniques for understanding concurrent programs are becoming increasingly
important as distributed computing systems become widespread in
mission-critical applications. My research has focused on the development
of these techniques.
I have been heavily involved in applying assertional reasoning to the
design of concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant, and real-time programs.
I am completing a textbook on this subject. Along with David Gries, I
continue investigations concerning our first-order equational logic E.
This past year, we streamlined the inference rules and evaluated a number
of techniques for handling undefined terms and partial functions.
Thomas Bressoud and I completed building and analyzing our hypervisor-based
implementation of replication management for HP's PA-RISC architecture.
Our protocols ensure that the sequence of instructions executed by two
virtual machines running on different physical processors are identical.
The protocols also coordinate I/O issued by these virtual machines. Use of
a hypervisor to implement replica coordination is attractive - at least, in
theory. When replica coordination is implemented in a hypervisor, it
instantly becomes available to all hardware realizations of the given
instruction-set architecture, including realizations that did not exist
when the hypervisor was written. Second, when replica coordination is
implemented in a hypervisor, a single implementation suffices for every
operating system that executes on that instruction-set architecture.
Finally, by implementing replica coordination in a hypervisor, the
applications programmer is freed from this task.
Jointly with Dag Johansen (University of Tromsø, Norway) and Robbert van
Renesse, I started the TACOMA project (Tromsø And COrnell Moving Agents) to
investigate support and use of mobile processes in building
mission-critical applications. By structuring a system in terms of agents,
applications can be constructed in which communication-network bandwidth is
conserved. Data may be accessed only by an agent executing at the same
site as the data resides. An agent typically will filter or otherwise
reduce the data it reads, carrying with it only the relevant information as
it roams the network. Two TACOMA prototypes have been completed, and we
are implementing a third system based on our experiences.
Finally, I developed with Scott Stoller a new algorithm for detecting
whether a particular computation of an asynchronous distributed system
could have passed through a global state satisfying some given state
predicate. The new algorithm allows more efficient detection than is
possible with previous algorithms.
University Activities
- Sabbatical leave, 1994-95
Professional Activities
- Editor-in-chief, Distributed Computing
- Editor, Information Processing Letters
- Editor, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Editor, High Integrity Systems
- Editor, Annals of Software Engineering
- Editor, ACM Computing Surveys
- Co-Editor, Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag
- Program Committee Member, 3rd International School and Symposium on
Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems
- Program Committee Member, 3rd International Conference on the Mathematics
of Program Construction
- Program Committee Member, 4th International Workshop On Responsive
Computer Systems
- Program Committee Member, Workshop on Composability of Fault-resilient
Real-Time Systems
- Program Committee Member, Fifth IFIP Working Conference on Dependable
Computing for Critical Applications
- Program Committee Member, Sixteenth IEEE International Real-Time Systems
Symposium
- Program Committee Member, DIMACS Workshop on Verification and Control
of Hybrid Systems
- Steering committee, Center for High Integrity Software Systems
Assurance (CHISSA), National Institute of Standards and Technology
- Member, ISAT Defensive Information Warfare Study Group, Advanced Research
Projects Agency
- Review committee, Leibniz Center at Hebrew University
- Member, IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology)
Awards
- Fellow, American Association for Advancement of Science
- Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery
Lectures
- Proof outlines for programs. 6 lectures. 15th International Summer
School, Marktoberdorf, Germany, July 1994.
- On the origin of traditions. Banquet speech. 15th International Summer
School, Marktoberdorf, Germany, July 1994.
- Reasoning about programs by exploiting the environment. AFOSR
Grantees/Contractors Meeting In Software and Systems, Washington,
D.C., Sept. 1994.
- Verifying hybrid systems by exploiting the environment. Symposium on
Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems.
Lubeck, Germany, Sept. 1994.
- Panelist: comparative merits of synchronous, partially synchronous,
and asynchronous models for safety-critical real-time systems.
Symposium on Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant
Systems. Lubeck, Germany, Sept. 1994.
- Moderator: issues in writing formal specifications. Specification and
Refinement of Reactive Systems. International Conference and Research
Center for Computer Science, Dagstuhl, Germany, Sept. 1994.
- Merging policies. Workshop on Computer Support for Policy Analysis and
Design. George Mason University, Virginia, Dec. 1994.
- Avoiding AAS mistakes. Invited speaker. Air Traffic Management Workshop,
NASA Ames Research Center, Feb. 1995.
- Reasoning about programs by exploiting the environment. Technical
University of Munich. Munich, Germany, Feb. 1995.
- Proof outlines of the past. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, March 1995.
- Adding fault-tolerance, virtually. Distinguished Lecture Series,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, March 1995.
- Moderator and panel organizer: teaching logic as tool. SIGCSE Technical
Symposium on Computer Science Education, Nashville, Tennessee, March 1995.
- Proof outlines of the past. Technion, Haifa, Israel, March 1995.
- Adding fault-tolerance, virtually. University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway,
April 1995.
- Concurrent programs from specifications. University of Tromsø, Tromsø,
Norway, April 1995.
- Placing agents on airplanes - a view of AAS and its successor. ARPA ISAT
Defensive Information Warfare Study Group Meeting, Washington, D.C.,
June 1995.
Publications
- Reasoning about programs by exploiting the environment. Proceedings 21st
International Colloquium, ICALP'94 (Jerusalem, Israel, July 1994),
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 820, Springer-Verlag, New York,
328-339 (with L. Fix).
- Notes on proof outline logic. Working Material. 15th International Summer
School, Marktoberdorf, Germany, July 1994.
- Research on fault-tolerant and real-time computing. Software and Systems
Program Summary. (Bolling Air Force Base, Washington D.C., Sept.
1994), Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 75-77.
- Hybrid verification by exploiting the environment. Formal Techniques in
Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems (Lubeck, Germany, September
1994), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 863, Springer-Verlag,
New York, 1-18 (with Limor Fix).
- Equational propositional logic. Information Processing Letters 53, 3
(February 1995), 145-152 (with D. Gries).
- Refinement for fault-tolerance: An aircraft hand-off protocol.
Foundations of Ultradependable Parallel and Distributed Computing,
Paradigms for Dependable Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1994, 39-54 (with K. Marzullo and J. Dehn).
- Teaching logic as a tool. Proceedings 26th SIGCSE Technical Symposium
on Computer Science Education (Nashville, Tennessee, March 1995),
SIGCSE Bulletin 27, 1, 384-385 (with D. Gries).
- Operating system support for mobile agents. Proceedings Fifth Workshop on
Hot Topics in Operating Systems HOTOS-V (Orcas Island, Washington,
May 1995), 42-45 (with Dag Johansen and Robbert van Renesse).
- Verifying programs that use causally-ordered message-passing. Science of
Computer Programming 24, 2 (1995), 105-128 (with S. Stoller).
- On teaching proof. Arts & Sciences NewsLetter 16, 2 (Spring 1995), 3
(with D. Gries).
- A new approach to discrete teaching mathematics. Primus V, 2 (June 1995),
113-138 (with D. Gries).
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Last modified: 24 November 1995 by Denise Moore
(denise@cs.cornell.edu).