Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA and First Place in ACM Student Research Competition
The award paper is led by CSE PhD candidate Swarnendu Biswas and co-authored by CSE PhD candidate Minjia Zhang, CSE professor Mike Bond, and Carnegie Mellon University professor Brandon Lucia. Their paper, "Valor: Efficient, Software-Only Region Conflict Exceptions," demonstrates a novel approach called Valor for improving the reliability of software systems, by ensuring strong behavioral guarantees for all program executions -- even executions that contain a notoriously challenging kind of software bug called a data race. Valor demonstrates how to provide strong execution guarantees even in today's commodity systems, by using a software-only approach that is significantly more efficient than previously known techniques.
The Valor paper also received an OOPSLA Distinguished Artifact Award, honoring Swarnendu's implementation of Valor for exceeding expectations by a committee of evaluators.
In addition, Swarnendu won first place in the graduate category of the 2016 ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). His winning entry, which was based on the Valor work before it was published, was selected from the winners of SRCs across all ACM conferences. Swarnendu and Mike were invited to the ACM Awards Banquet in June where Swarnendu received the award.