The School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin is seeking a post-doctoral Research Fellow in the field of formal software verification, for a duration of 15-18 months, to start as soon as possible. Salary range €40k-€51.5k p.a., depending on experience and precise duration.
RTEMS-SMP Qualification is an activity funded by the European Space Agency to perform pre-qualification of an upcoming release of the open-source real-time operating system RTEMS (rtems.org). This release provides support for running RTEMS on multi-core systems. Researchers from Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre are involved in a task that explores the use of formal verification techniques in this qualification process. The task is to deploy formal techniques such as model-checking and possibly theorem proving, to assist in improving the quality of qualification results in key areas. Key areas under consideration include: modelling and verifying the multicore scheduling algorithms MrsP and OMIP and key synchronisation primitives; exploring how formal methods can help with test generation, and particularly for assembly code, with coverage analysis; and probabilistic reasoning to work around testing difficulties due to lack of predictability inherent in multi-core systems. This will require the development and revision of requirements for these algorithms, development of formal models for appropriate formal tools and ways to automate, as far as is practical, the running of those tools. Two key challenges are: to produce outputs that are suitable for software qualification; while doing this in a way that is acceptable to the open-source community (rtems.org) that maintains the operating system. The ideal candidate will have a PhD in software verification with PhD and postdoctoral experience of a number of the following: formal verification tools used in industry such as Promela/SPIN,TLA+, Frama-C; formal models of concurrency; weak memory models; probabilistic modelling; refactoring code to minimise false positives from static analysis tools; software certification and qualification processes; real-time operating systems; and related topics. The position is based at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (http://www.tcd.ie) and the research fellow will become of a member of Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (http://lero.ie). It will also involve travel to some of the partners, as well as the the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC). The activity is being run by a consortium led by Thales Edisoft (Portugal), with partners Embedded Brains (Germany), Jena Optronik (Germany), CISTER Research Centre, ISEP (Portugal), and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) as part of Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre. Further details, including how to apply, can be obtained from https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Andrew.Butterfield/recruitment/ESA-RTEMS-SMP-Task-3.html which will be regularly updated, or via twitter hashtag #FormalRTEMS. Application deadline, 12noon, Irish Standard Time, Wednesday, 18th September. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Butterfield Tel: +353-1-896-2517 Fax: +353-1-677-2204 Lero@TCD, Head of Foundations & Methods Research Group School of Computer Science and Statistics, Room G.39, O'Reilly Institute, Trinity College, University of Dublin http://www.scss.tcd.ie/Andrew.Butterfield/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@rtems.org http://lists.rtems.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
