CME · Concurrency Made Easy

The “Concurrency Made Easy” project is an attempt to achieve a conceptual breakthrough on the most daunting challenge in information technology today: mastering concurrency. Concurrency, once a specialized technique for experts, is forcing itself onto the entire IT community because of a disruptive phenomenon: the “end of Moore’s law as we know it”. Increases in performance can no longer happen through raw hardware speed, but only through concurrency, as in multicore architectures. Concurrency is also critical for networking, cloud computing and the progress of natural sciences. Software support for these advances lags, mired in concepts from the 1960s such as semaphores. Existing formal models are hard to apply in practice. Incremental progress is not sufficient; neither are techniques that place the burden on programmers, who cannot all be expected to become concurrency experts. The CME project attempts a major shift on the side of the supporting technology: languages, formal models, verification techniques. The core idea of the CME project is to make concurrency easy for programmers, by building on established ideas of modern programming methodology (object technology, Design by Contract) shifting the concurrency difficulties to the internals of the model and implementation.The project includes the following elements.1. Sound conceptual model for concurrency. The starting point is the influential previous work of the PI: concepts of object-oriented design, particularly Design by Contract, and the SCOOP concurrency model.2. Reference implementation, integrated into an IDE.3. Performance analysis.4. Theory and formal basis, including full semantics.5. Proof techniques, compatible with proof techniques for the sequential part.6. Complementary verification techniques such as concurrent testing.7. Library of concurrency components and examples.8. Publication, including a major textbook on concurrency.