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• 25th APART Anniversary Meeting

25 years ago, the EU collaboration project APART was started. Many research activities and research collaborations originated from APART. We, Bernd Mohr, Thomas Fahringer, and Michael Gerndt came up with the idea to celebrate this anniversary. We found and reserved a lovely location offered by the University of Innsbruck in the Alps. The location (University Center Obergurgl, https://www.uibk.ac.at/uz-obergurgl/index.html.en) is at approx. 2000 meter altitude in a spectacular mountain scenery of Tirol/Austria and offers excellent skiing, cross-country skiing as well as winter hiking during the time of our planned meeting.

The goal of the meeting is to look back at 25 years of research and forward to the next 25 years. We would like to reserve much time for personal meetings and discussions but would also invite presentations. Furthermore, we will plan for plenty of time to enjoy the mountain scenery, winter sports, etc. in Obergurgl.

• Zum Anlass des 350-jaehrigen Jubilaeums der Universitaet Innsbruck hat die Zeitung “Dolomiten” am Freitag dem 28. Juni 2019 einen Beitrag ueber die aktuelle Forschung vom DPS-Team zum Thema paralelles Rechnen veroeffentlicht. Den Artikel finden Sie im unteren Bereich dieses Auszugs.

• Cristina Cifuentes from Oracle Labs Australia will give a presentation about the topic “Are we Ready for Secure Languages? “ on 14th July 2016, 14:00 – 16:00, in ICT buildung, ground floor, room SR1

Abstract:
Language designers and developers want better ways to write good code – languages designed with simpler, more powerful abstractions accessible to a larger community of developers. However, language design does not seem to take into account security,
leaving developers with the onerous task of writing attack-proof code. In 20 years, we have gone from 25 reported vulnerabilities to 6,883 vulnerabilities. We see some of the most common vulnerabilities happening in commonly used software – cross-site scripting,
SQL injections, and buffer overflows. Attacks are becoming sophisticated, often exploitation three or four weaknesses; making it harder for developers to reason about the source of the problem.

I’ll overview some recent attacks and argue our languages must take security seriously. Languages need security-oriented constructs, and compiler must let developers know when there is a problem with their code. We need to empower developers with the
concept of “security for the masses” by making available languages that do not necessarily require an expert in order to determine whether the code being written is vulnerable to attack or not.

Bio
Cristina is the Director of Oracle Labs Australia and an Architect at Oracle. Headquartered in Brisbane, the focus of the Lab is Program Analysis as it applies to finding vulnerabilities in software and enhancing the productivity of developers worldwide.
Prior to founding Oracle Labs Australia, Cristina was the Principal Investigator of the Parfait bug tracking project at Sun Microsystems, then Oracle. Today, Oracle Parfait has become the defacto tool used by thousands of Oracle developers for bug and
vulnerability detection in real-world, commercially sized C/C++/Java applications. The success of the Parfait tool is founded on the pioneering work in advancing static program analysis techniques carried out by Cristina’s team of Researchers and Engineers at Oracle Labs Australia.
Cristina’s passion for tackling the big issues in the field of Program Analysis began with her doctoral work in binary decompilation at Queensland’s University of Technology. In an interview with Richard Morris for Geek of the Week, Cristina talks about Parfait,
Walkabout and her career journey in this field. Prior to her work at Oracle and Sun Microsystems, Cristina held teaching posts at major Australian Universities, co-edited Going Digital, a landmark book on cybersecurity, and served on the executive committees of ACM SIGPLAN and IEEE Reverse Engineering.
Cristina continues to play an active role in the international programming language, compiler construction and software security communities. On the weekends, she channels her interests into mentoring young programmers through the CoderDojo network.

• Costin Iancu from LBNL talks about “Scalable Dynamic Program Analysis for HPC Codes” on 18th July 2016 from 1 – 2 pm in 3w04

Abstract:
Efficient usage of supercomputers requires exposing and coordinating very large parallelism, soon to be in the billion range. Although
languages and runtime APIs expose asynchronous interfaces, these are not well exploited in codes due to the complexity of managing and tracking parallelism:
neither compiler, nor manual optimizations are feasible in real production codes which are a composition of multiple languages, libraries, even disjoint binaries.
In this talk I will argue that dynamic program analysis is a feasible way (the only feasible way) to build tools able to handle full codes.
I will describe our efforts to implement fast and scalable analyses and describe applications in bug finding, synchronization elimination and energy optimizations of complex codes.

Bio
Costin Iancu is a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. He is one of the main authors of the Berkeley UPC compiler (BUPC), the first ubiquitous
and high performance implementation of a Partitioned Global Address Space Language. BUPC has been extensively used in large scale HPC installations, as well as in academia.
His research interests span parallel language and runtime design, OS services and more recently high productivity data analytics runtimes.
In the area of code optimization, his most recent work is developing practical tools to handle multi-language, multi-runtime modular software (aka production software) and to perform cross-stack optimizations (e.g. MPI+OS kernel).
He is always interested in fostering new collaborations with academia and happy to host visitors and collaborators at LBNL.