Guerraoui Rachid, Adversary-Oriented Computing

© 2013 EPFL

© 2013 EPFL

Rachid Guerraoui, head of the Distributed Programming Laboratory at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, has been awarded an ADVANCED GRANT 2013 from the European Research Council (ERC). ERC Advanced Grants allow exceptional established research leaders to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects that open new directions in their respective research fields or other domains.

Adversary-Oriented Computing

Recent technological evolutions, including the cloud, the multicore, the social and the mobiles ones, are turning computing ubiquitously distributed. Yet, building high-assurance distributed programs is notoriously challenging. One of the main reasons is that these systems usually seek to achieve several goals at the same time. In short, they need to be efficient, responding effectively in various average-case conditions, as well as reliable, behaving correctly in severe, worst-case conditions. The resulting programs end up hard to design, prove, verify, implement, test and debug.
The goal of this project is to explore the inherent power and limitations of a novel paradigm, Adversary-Oriented Computing (AOC). Sub-programs, each implementing a specific strategy to cope with a given adversary, modeling a specific working condition, are designed, proved, verified, implemented, tested and debugged independently. They are then composed, possibly dynamically, as black-boxes within the same global program.

Max ERC funding: 2.14 million Euros
Duration: 60 months
Host institution: EPFL
Project acronym: AOC
Domain: Physical and Engineering Sciences