PhD course: Reversible Computing

Post date: 19-Jun-2013 08:48:38

Upcoming PhD course

Reversible Computing

July 15-19, 2013

Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica - Via Ospedale 72, Cagliari

Ivan Lanese

UniversitĂ  di Bologna & INRIA FOCUS Team

Abstract. Reversible computing emerges spontaneously in many areas, such as quantum computing or biological modeling. Also, reversible computing

allows for recoverability: when an error occurs reversibility allows one to go back to a past state and try again. Reversibility is well understood in a sequential setting: to reverse a computation one has to recursively undo the last step. This is not possible in a concurrent scenario, since it may not be clear which the last performed action is.

We will study reversibility for concurrent interacting systems. In particular, we consider causal consistent reversibility, where only actions which have produced no consequences can be undone. We consider uncontrolled forms of reversibility first. However, uncontrolled reversibility is not suitable for programming safe applications, since backward steps should be triggered only when an error state is reached. To this end we define a rollback operator allowing the programmer to control when backward steps are performed. We also show that specifying alternatives is useful to avoid looping behaviors. We make our intuitions formal using reversible process calculi. Finally, we discuss applications of our theory to transactions and to debugging.

The official presentation of the course will be on July 15 (Monday) in Aula C, at 10:00. The schedule of the course will be fixed during this meeting.

Course schedule.

  • Monday 15, 10.00-12.00 Aula F [slides]
  • Tuesday 16, 10.00-12.00 Aula F [slides]
  • Wednesday 17, 10.00-12.00 Aula C [slides]
  • Thursday 18, 10.00-12.00 Aula C [slides]
  • Friday 19, 10.00-12.00 Aula C [slides]

The course has been funded by the PhD Course in Computer Science of the University of Cagliari.