Abstract: Is it possible to bring support for safe parallel programming to modern programming languages, where the compiler does the work of detecting possible data races while the programmer simply identifies where in their program they would like to take advantage of multicore/manycore hardware capabilities? This talk will introduce the programming language ParaSail (Parallel Specification and Implementation Language) which provides safe parallel programming in the context of a pointer-free, object-oriented, strongly-typed modern programming language. The talk will also include a discussion of other recent work to bring compile-time safety to parallel programming, including the upcoming 202X version of the Ada programming language, the OpenMP multiplatform, multilanguage API for parallel programming, and Rust, a language that from the beginning tried to provide safe concurrent programming, and more recently has provided a safe light-weight parallelism library called Rayon.



See https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1902/1902.00525.pdf for more information on ParaSail.



Bio: S. Tucker Taft has been working on programming language design for his entire career. Tucker is currently VP and Director of Language Research at AdaCore. Tucker led the Ada 9X language design team, culminating in the February 1995 approval of Ada 95 as the first ISO standardized object-oriented programming language. His specialties include programming language design, advanced static analysis tools, formal methods, real-time systems, parallel programming, and model-based development. Tucker is a member of the ISO Rapporteur Group that developed Ada 2005 and Ada 2012. Tucker has also been designing and implementing a parallel programming language called "ParaSail," and defining parallel programming extensions for Ada as part of the forthcoming Ada 202X standard.



Prior to joining AdaCore, Tucker was Founder and CTO of SofCheck, Inc., providing tools and technology to enhance software development quality and productivity. Prior to that Mr. Taft was a Chief Scientist at Intermetrics, Inc. and its follow-ons for 22 years. Tucker received an A.B. Summa Cum Laude degree from Harvard University, where he has more recently taught compiler construction and programming language design.