Computer Science

Colloquium Details

A Disciplined Approach to Machine-Level Software

Abstract

The last five years have seen explosive growth in machine-level software tools, including tools to support binary translation, profiling, tracing, testing, mobile code, and more. These are great tools, but they are hard to build for more than one hardware platform. This talk will present a brief overview of Computer Systems Description Languages (CSDL), which provide formal descriptions of properties of machines. These descriptions can be used to help build, and in some cases to generate, machine-level software tools. The talk will focus on the application of CSDL's semantic formalism to a tricky problem in the construction of binary translators---the translation of delayed branches.

Biography

Norman Ramsey began his research career in physics, a field in which he spent several years before deciding that engineering was more fun than science. After earning his PhD from Princeton in 1993, he spent several years in ``industrial research'' before returning to academia. He has worked on a significant number of different software tools, most recently the National Compiler Infrastructure, but he may be best known for his literate-programming tool ``Noweb.''