Design and Evaluation of Reliable Software Systems

The explosion in system and application complexity, together with the rapid growth in the breadth, diversity, and societal impact of software, has resulted in ever expanding failure sources. As systems have become complex and the software executing on these systems has become diverse and ubiquitous, its resilience assumes an increasing importance in multiple facets of daily life. In comparison, hardware failures, although important, continue to be at manageable levels. It is not uncommon for software to contribute to large outages - for systems ranging from large clouds to small-embedded devices. This talk will outline major challenges and opportunities in the design and validation of reliable software systems, exemplifying the major issues and directions of research. Specifically, we will address key application domains from i) High Performance Computing and ii) Cloud Computing Systems to iii) Cyberphysical Infrastructures such as the Smart Grid to iv) Small Embedded Devices of the future focused on personalized medicine, driven by automatic patient moniProfessor Iyer is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), and the Department of Computer Science, and serves as Chief Scientist of the Information Trust Institute.