The System Software and Software Security+(S4+) Group's research interests includes programming languages, operating systems, and parallel computing, especially programming frameworks and computational optimization, software analysis that combine emerging applications (such as intelligent sensing and services) with new computing hardware (such as CPU / GPU heterogeneous systems, quantum systems) And security, etc.
Based on the research of system software and software security, we are committed to making software easy to develop and feasible, reliable and efficient in hardware. The main research focus currently are:
(1) Computing System Optimization
Autonoumus vehicle system can be summarized as three parts: perception, planning and control. Among them, perception is the basis of system safety and intelligence. In recent years, with the development of neural networks, the accuracy of perception tasks has improved dramatically, but at the same time the network computational complexity and model size have also become larger. In order to support a variety of high-precision perceptual computing tasks on an in-vehicle system with limited computing power, and to meet the needs of unmanned driving for perceptual accuracy and real-time performance. The team explored CPU / GPU collaborative compilation and parallel optimization technologies from different levels of heterogeneous tasks, homogeneous multi-tasks and single tasks.
(2) Quantum System Software
After decades of development, quantum computing area has entered the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. The characteristics of the quantum computer in the NISQ era are: the number of qubits has exceeded the limitation of classical computer simulation; small and medium-sized algorithms and applications can be realized on various NISQ quantum computers; the NISQ quantum computers are subject to large noise interference while the number of qubits is not enough to implement the error correction mechanism. Therefore quantum programs in the NISQ era must be run in a noisy environment. Our team focuses on the design and implementation of quantum programming languages, the analysis and optimization of quantum programs, and develops corresponding tools. We devote to building a bridge from quantum algorithms to quantum computers, and improving the speed, success rate and operational scale of quantum programs on quantum computers.
(3) Software Analysis and Security
Most real-world software systems are multilingual, that is, they consist of components developed in different programming languages, enabling to reuse existing code modules, and to mix and match strengths of different languages. Recently, many representative multilingual software systems spring up in fields like artificial intelligent, quantum information, scientific computing, etc. Some representative architectures, like Python frontend with C/C++ native implementation, are adopted by more and more applications. However, it’s difficult to write safe and reliable multilingual software, programmers need carefully take into account the discrepancies between languages on issues such as language features, data layout, memory management, safety/security assumptions, and many others. At the same time, for lack of empirical analysis, program analysis infrastructures and frameworks, existing software analysis techniques cannot support multilingual software effectively and efficiently. Based on these research questions, this team will study the multilingual program analysis/verification, develop novel methods and tools for complex program comprehension and bug finding/fixing.