Franchetti and researchers awarded DARPA BRASS project

ECE professors Franz Franchetti, James Hoe, and José Moura, along with Tze Meng Low, an ECE systems scientist, have been awarded a project in DARPA’s Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) program. The funded project ($2.7M over 4 years) works to ensure that applications can seamlessly continue to operate correctly and usefully in the face of formidable challenges. The Carnegie Mellon team is supported by SpiralGen, Inc. and David A. Padua, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The goal of the Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems program (BRASS) is to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived, survivable and complex software systems that are robust to changes in the physical and logical resources provided by their ecosystem. These advances will necessitate integration of new resource-aware program abstractions and analysis, in addition to novel compiler and systems designs to trigger adaptive transformations and validate their effectiveness.

Their approach centers on the ideas that future-proof code requires a layered specification of semantics, quality/parameter relationships, performance/quality/resource trade-offs, quality measures and fault tolerance, and a powerful code synthesis engine that turns this specification into reconfigurable, extensible high-performance implementations specialized to their execution environment. It is based on the SPIRAL code generation and autotuning system and philosophy.