Dr. Jeff Huang, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, was chosen by the Google Faculty Research Awards Program as a recipient of financial support for his proposal, "Scalable and Practical Debugging Techniques for Large Concurrent Software." This project is one of 122 chosen from a total of 808 considered by Google during its winter 2015 call for research project proposals.
"Software debugging is a challenging task, yet debugging parallel software is harder," said Huang. "The goal of this research project is to investigate scalable and practical debugging techniques for real world parallel software running on multicore platforms.
"Parallel software, which allows multiple computations executed in parallel, is the only way to unleash the computation power provided by today's multicore processors. Unfortunately, parallel programming is much harder, and debugging parallel programs is notoriously difficult. When a failure occurs in a parallel program, it is even challenging to reproduce the failure because the scheduling of parallel computations may not be deterministic.
"The hoped for result of this research is that it will lead to a debugging framework that will help diagnose failures in large complex parallel software by quickly detecting, reproducing, and localizing failures with minimal program slowdown."
Huang joined the Parasol Laboratory in fall 2014. He came to Texas A&M from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was a postdoctoral research associate working with Dr. Grigore Rosu on "Runtime Verification of Concurrent and Distributed Systems." Huang currently teaches a graduate course in Fundamentals of Software Analysis.
His research focuses on developing techniques and tools for improving software performance and reliability based on fundamental program analyses and programming language theory.
Among Huang's many honors are the 2013 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Dissertation Award for his doctoral thesis, "Effective Methods for Debugging Concurrent Software," and a Distinguished Paper Award from the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI). He was also the winner of the 2012 PLDI Student Research Competition and a winner of the 2010 Professor Samuel Chanson Best Teaching Assistant Award.
One of the goals of the Google Faculty Research Awards Program is to fund leading edge advancements in new technology projects in computer science, engineering, and related fields. Its next submission deadline is April 15, 2015. To learn more about the Google Faculty Research Awards Program, visit http://research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html.