Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems

Welcome to the web site of the Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Our department is responsible for research and education in the advanced techniques for building reliable component-based software especially in the field of distributed and dependable systems. This comprises model-driven development, formal verification techniques, performance measurement and modeling, and other fields.

The vision pursued by our department is that of high-quality scientific research with strong industrial relevance, with the aim to enable rapid and cost-efficient production of complex and reliable software systems. To achieve this vision, our department actively collaborates on the national and international level with both academic and industrial partners. Recent projects include Ferdinand, ASCENS (FP7 FET IP), RELATE (FP7 ITN), Q-ImPrESS (FP7 STREP), CoCoME.

Computer Science at Charles University

Research Activities

Our research activities focus on different aspects of building component-based software, with emphasis on four distinct topics:

  • Component-based and service-oriented modeling. We focus on state-of-the-art methods of model-driven development, model and code generation and reuse. A distinct feature of our research is that we also target the runtime support for component-based systems. These activities take place mainly in the scope of the SOFA 2 project and recently also in the SOFA HI project, which focuses specifically on embedded systems.

  • Verification and validation. We focus on behavioral modeling of component applications and on the source code model checking. This includes, e. g., comparing component implementation in Java with its behavior model, and verifying absence of assertion violations in C/C++ source code.

  • Performance measurement and modeling. We focus on analyzing and modeling the performance-related behavior of modern multithreading and multiprocessing platforms, coupling these activities with work on robust measurement methods and tools that integrate with the software development process. Besides performance modeling and regression benchmarking, our projects also include industrial middleware performance evaluation.

  • Component-based operating systems. We focus on formal reasoning about correctness and safety properties of both embedded and general-purpose operating systems. We make use of methods of formal description of operating system architecture and behavior, implementing parts of the operating system as fine-grained software components and also building on the state-of-the-art software engineering principles. Our research implementation is HelenOS.

Teaching Activities

Our department is responsible for teaching courses at bachelor, master and doctoral levels. Integrated with the university curriculum, the courses give a deep technical understanding of computer architectures, major programming languages, operating systems, middleware, and methods of reliable software design. The courses are supplemented by cross-cutting seminars open to students at all levels, featuring international researchers and industrial practitioners who bring up-to-date research and industrial topics to the interested students and faculty members.

Students

The teaching activities of our department rely strongly on personal collaboration with individual students. We involve bachelor and master students in our research through various types of individual and group projects. This helps students in their future careers by providing a technically demanding experience that exercises the ability to formulate ideas and to apply critical reasoning.

Doctoral Students

Ph.D. student having a talk

Our department has a long tradition of bringing up excellent doctoral students who secure positions in leading industrial companies and recognized academic institutions. Our Ph.D. students participate in national and international research projects related to their main research topic and collect teaching experience in education at bachelor and master levels. This gives our Ph.D. students valuable practical experience as well as the necessary soft skills that heavily contribute to career development.

Member of

OW2 Consortium Member Object Management Group Member SPEC Research Group Member Official Esterel Technologies Academic Partner Google Summer of Code 2011 Mentoring Organization

Highlights

News

Next D3S Seminar

Full-time Research Positions Available from June 2011

RELATE logo Three PhD candidate positions in the area of service oriented systems are available at the Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. These positions will be funded in the framework of the Marie-Curie European ITN Relate.

The offered PhD theses topics will be in the following areas:

  • Formal Specification of Services
  • Model-driven development of real service-oriented systems
  • Supporting heterogeneous service-oriented systems

Contact: Tomáš Bureš, bures<at-sign>d3s.mff.cuni.cz

More information on eligibility and how to apply at www.relate-itn.eu.

HelenOS 10th Anniversary

HelenOS logo With a little artistic license one could say that the history of the HelenOS project is quite similar to the growth of a child. Ten years ago the project started as a school assignment to create a portable operating system kernel. It was named SPARTAN by its author Jakub Jermář, owing not only to his fascination with the ancient Greece, but capturing also the basic design principles in the name. It was a baby carefully educated by its father.

Five years later the sole initiative changed to a team project with the goal to create solid foundations for a portable microkernel multiserver operating system designed using state-of-the-art principles of software engineering. SPARTAN turned into HelenOS and started to learn new interesting things like a file system and networking.

This year, as HelenOS turns into a teenager, the team of contributors is envolving enough people to fill a bus, it participated in the Google Summer of Code, it can use USB devices and it is very close to an important milestone — self-hosting. HelenOS is not mature yet, but the time will come.

Read more...

Ph.D. Studies

Are you interested in

  • Component systems?
  • Software verification?
  • Software benchmarking?
  • Operating systems?

Consider Ph.D. studies at D3S!

Modified on 2011-08-22