Technology Blog

Computers should not play dice. That, to paraphrase Einstein, is the feeling of a University of Washington computer scientist with a simple manifesto: If you enter the same computer command, you should get back the same result. Unfortunately, that is far from the case with many of today's machines. Beneath their smooth exteriors, modern computers behave in wildly unpredictable ways, said Luis Ceze, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. read more

"With older, single-processor systems, computers behave exactly the same way as long as you give the same commands. Today's computers are non-deterministic. Even if you give the same set of commands, you might get a different result," Ceze said.
"With multi-core systems the trend is to have more bugs because it's harder to write code for them," Ceze said. "And these concurrency bugs are much harder to get a handle on."
"We've developed a basic technique that could be used in a range of systems, from cell phones to data centers," Ceze said. "Ultimately, I want to make it really easy for people to design high-performing, low-energy and secure systems."
"We can compress the effect of thousands of people using a program into a few minutes during the software's development," Ceze said. "We want to allow people to write code for multi-core systems without going insane."