Abstract

Abstract
This paper extends the authors earlier proposal for providing Ada with support for fine-grained parallelism with an execution model based on the concept of abstract executors, detailing the progress guarantees that these executors must provide and how these can be assured even in the presence of potentially blocking operations. The paper also describes how this execution model can be applied to real-time systems. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Abstract
Verification and testing are two of the most costly and time consuming steps during the development of safety critical systems. The advent of complex and sometimes partially unpredictable computing architectures such as multicore commercial-of-the-shelf platforms, together with the composable development approach adopted in multiple industrial domains such as avionics and automotive, rendered the exhaustive testing of all situations that could potentially be encountered by the system once deployed on the field nearly impossible. Run-time verification (RV) is a promising solution to help accelerate the development of safety critical applications whilst maintaining the high degree of reliability required by such systems. RV adds monitors in the application, which check at run-time if the system is behaving according to predefined specifications. In case of deviations from the specifications during the runtime, safeguarding measures can be triggered in order to keep the system and its environment in a safe state, as well as potentially attempting to recover from the fault that caused the misbehaviour. Most of the state-of-the-art on RV essentially focused on the monitor generation, concentrating on the expressiveness of the specification language and its translation in correct-by-construction monitors. Few of them addressed the problem of designing an efficient and safe run-time monitoring (RM) architecture. Yet, RM is a key component for RV. The RM layer gathers information from the monitored application and transmits it to the monitors. Therefore, without an efficient and safe RM architecture, the whole RV system becomes useless, as its inputs and hence by extension its outputs cannot be trusted. In this paper, we discuss the design of a novel RM architecture suited to safety critical applications. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Abstract
The widespread use of multi-CPU computers is challenging programming languages, which need to adapt to be able to express potential parallelism at the language level. In this paper we propose a new model for fine grained parallelism in Ada, putting forward a syntax based on aspects, and the corresponding semantics to integrate this model with the existing Ada tasking capabilities. We also propose a standard interface and show how it can be extended by the user or library writers to implement their own parallelization strategies. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract

Abstract
The second session on the topic of Multiprocessor Issues reviewed and evaluated the efficacy of the Ada 2012 support in the area of multiprocessor resource control. Andy Wellings, the Chair presented a proposal of an API that allowed controlling and extending the queue locks, and implementing the access control protocols. In the second part of the session, Miguel Pinho started by presenting an overview of Transactional Memory (TM), providing a quick overview of how in this approach atomic sections are executed concurrently and speculatively, in isolation. In the third topic of the session, the Chair started by providing an overview of the Reference Manual wordings concerning the access and control protocols for Protected Objects, noting that both the RM and the Annotated Reference Manual (ARM) do not fully define the access protocol for a protected object on a multiprocessor system. Finally, in the last topic (parallel barriers in Protected Objects), the workshop concluded that this would be a good mechanism to have, but that a suitable approach needs further investigation.