The foundations of concurrent systems: Communicating Sequential Processes

Introduction

Concurrency is important to much of computation; from computing in the large (networks and their distributed systems like an airline-reservation system) to computing in the small (VLSI chips and their parallel algorithms like image processing chips). Because of the complex manner in which coordinating components interact, we use formal methods for the specification, development and simulation of such systems... more

Lecturer:J. W. Sanders

J.W. Sanders is Principal Research Fellow at the International Institute for Software Technology, United Nations University, Macao, China. His interests lie largely in the application of rigorous methods to model, and hence reason about, novel and/or intractible forms of Computation: concurrency, probabilism, security, time, asynchronicity, quantum computation and multi-agent systems.

Dr Sanders holds degrees in Mathematics from Monash University and the Australian National University. He has taught across the range of undergraduate and graudate courses in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science, and has taught courses in China, Africa, Iran and Malaysia. He has supervised numerous MSc and PhD students. Before moving to Macao he spent 22 years at the Programming Research Group, Oxford, and is now an emeritus fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Foundations of multicore programming: algorithm and verification

Introduction

The advent of multicore era of modern processors calls for a paradigmatic shift from sequential programming to concurrent programming. Traditionally the vocabulary of concurrent programming has been largely that of shared memory with locks (e.g. semaphores, critical regions, monitors, etc.). Whether it comprises a good vocabulary for multicore programming, i.e. in the respects of efficiency, scalability and abstraction, is still controversial. The quest for a better vocabulary (that scores well in all three respects) is well underway in both academia and industries...more

Lecturer:Xu Wang

Dr. Xu Wang is currently a research fellow at the International Institute for Software Technology, United Nations University. His research interests lie in the broad field of semantic and verification of concurrent systems, where he specialises in developing automatic verification methods and state space reduction techniques for CSP/FDR. Before joining UNU-IIST as an assistant research fellow in 2006, he worked as research staff at HKUST, Oxford University and Birmingham University since 2000. He holds PhD, M.Eng. and B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xi'an Jiaotong University. He would like to work with motivated students with interests in applying formal methods to solve practical problems in concurrent systems.