James Bornholt

This work introduces a new approach to building crash-safe file systems for persistent memory. We exploit the fact that Rust’s typestate pattern allows compile-time enforcement of a specific order of operations. We introduce a novel crash-consistency mechanism, Synchronous Soft Updates , that boils down crash safety to enforcing ordering among updates to file-system metadata. We employ this approach to build SquirrelFS , a new file system with crash-consistency guarantees that are checked at compile time . SquirrelFS avoids the need for separate proofs, instead incorporating correctness guarantees into the typestate itself. Compiling SquirrelFS only takes tens of seconds; successful compilation indicates crash consistency, while an error provides a starting point for fixing the bug. We evaluate SquirrelFS against state-of-the-art file systems such as NOVA and WineFS, and find that SquirrelFS achieves similar or better performance on a wide range of benchmarks and applications.

Embedded applications extract the best power-performance trade-off from digital signal processors (DSPs) by making extensive use of vectorized execution. Rather than handwriting the many customized kernels these applications use, DSP engineers rely on auto-vectorizing compilers to quickly produce effective code. Building these compilers is a large and error-prone investment, and each new DSP architecture or application-specific ISA customization must repeat this effort to derive a new high-performance compiler. We present Isaria, a framework for automatically generating vectorizing compilers for DSP architectures. Isaria uses equality saturation to search for vectorized DSP code using a system of rewrite rules. Rather than hand-crafting these rules, Isaria automatically synthesizes sound rewrite rules from an ISA specification, discovers phase structure within these rules that improve compilation performance, and schedules their application at compile time while pruning intermediate states of the search. We use Isaria to generate a compiler for an industrial DSP architecture, and show that the resulting kernels outperform existing DSP libraries by up to 6.9× and are competitive with those generated by expert-built compilers. We also demonstrate how Isaria can speed up exploration of new ISA customizations by automatically generating a high-quality vectorizing compiler.

A monitor is a widely-used concurrent programming abstraction that encapsulates all shared state between threads. Monitors can be classified as being either implicit or explicit depending on the primitives they provide. Implicit monitors are much easier to program but typically not as efficient. To address this gap, there has been recent research on automatically synthesizing explicit-signal monitors from an implicit specification, but prior work does not exploit all paralellization opportunities due to the use of a single lock for the entire monitor. This paper presents a new technique for synthesizing fine-grained explicit-synchronization protocols from implicit monitors. Our method is based on two key innovations: First, we present a new static analysis for inferring safe interleavings that allow violating mutual exclusion of monitor operations without changing its semantics. Second, we use the results of this static analysis to generate a MaxSAT instance whose models correspond to correct-by-construction synchronization protocols. We have implemented our approach in a tool called Cortado and evaluate it on monitors that contain parallelization opportunities. Our evaluation shows that Cortado can synthesize synchronization policies that are competitive with, or even better than, expert-written ones on these benchmarks.

A monitor is a widely-used concurrent programming abstraction that encapsulates all shared state between threads. Monitors can be classified as being either implicit or explicit depending on the primitives they provide. Implicit monitors are much easier to program but typically not as efficient. To address this gap, there has been recent research on automatically synthesizing explicit-signal monitors from an implicit specification, but prior work does not exploit all paralellization opportunities due to the use of a single lock for the entire monitor. This paper presents a new technique for synthesizing fine-grained explicit-synchronization protocols from implicit monitors. Our method is based on two key innovations: First, we present a new static analysis for inferring safe interleavings that allow violating mutual exclusion of monitor operations without changing its semantics. Second, we use the results of this static analysis to generate a MaxSAT instance whose models correspond to correct-by-construction synchronization protocols. We have implemented our approach in a tool called Cortado and evaluate it on monitors that contain parallelization opportunities. Our evaluation shows that Cortado can synthesize synchronization policies that are competitive with, or even better than, expert-written ones on these benchmarks.

This paper presents an analysis of noninterference specifications used in a range of formally verified systems. The main findings are that these systems use distinct specifications and that they often employ small variations, both complicating their security implications. We categorize these specifications and discuss their trade-offs for reasoning about information flows in systems.

Demand for data storage is growing exponentially, but the capacity of existing storage media is not keeping up. Using DNA to archive data is an attractive possibility because it is extremely dense, with a raw limit of 1 exabyte/mm ³ (109 GB/mm ³ ), and long-lasting, with observed half-life of over 500 years. This paper presents an architecture for a DNA-based archival storage system. It is structured as a key-value store, and leverages common biochemical techniques to provide random access. We also propose a new encoding scheme that offers controllable redundancy, trading off reliability for density. We demonstrate feasibility, random access, and robustness of the proposed encoding with wet lab experiments involving 151 kB of synthesized DNA and a 42 kB random-access subset, and simulation experiments of larger sets calibrated to the wet lab experiments. Finally, we highlight trends in biotechnology that indicate the impending practicality of DNA storage for much larger datasets.