Wed Mar 12, 2008, 11:00-12:00, 4549 Boelter Hall

Jan Vitek
Purdue University

StreamFlex: High-throughput Stream Processing in Java

The stream programming paradigm aims to expose coarse-grained
parallelism in applications that must process continuous sequences of
events. The appeal of stream programming comes from its conceptual
simplicity. A program is a collection of independent ?lters which
communicate by the means of uni-directional data channels. This model
lends itself naturally to concurrent and efficient implementations on
modern multiprocessors. As the output behavior of filters is
determined by the state of their input channels, stream programs have
fewer opportunities for the errors that plague shared memory
concurrent programming.

StreamFlex is an extension to Java which marries streams with objects
and thus enables to combine, in the same Java virtual machine, stream
processing code with traditional object-oriented components.
StreamFlex targets high-throughput low-latency applications with
stringent quality-of-service requirements. To achieve these goals, it
must, at the same time, extend and restrict Java. To allow for program
optimization and provide latency guarantees, the StreamFlex compiler
restricts Java by imposing a stricter typing discipline on streaming
code.

About the speaker: Professor Vitek is working in foundations and 
implementation of computer programming languages and has interest 
in program analysis, real time languages, object-oriented software 
engineering and information security.  He is leading the Open Virtual 
Machines project to develop a framework for configurable and secure 
virtual machines for object-oriented languages.  This research is 
being conducted in the Secure Software Systems (S3) Lab founded in 
early 2000 by Professors Vitek, Hosking, and Palsberg.
Dr. Vitek was born in Czechoslovakia and educated in Switzerland. 
He earned a MSc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, 
Canada, and a Ph.D. from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. 
He has authored over 30 papers and has edited two books on mobile 
objects and secure Internet programming.  He has served on program 
committees for international conferences such as PLDI, OOPSLA, ECOOP, 
POPL, ESOP, ICALP, and SACMAT.  Dr. Vitek is a member of CERIAS. 

Host: Jens Palsberg.