News

December 14, 2011

Bertrand Meyer and the Chair of Software Engineering have received an Advanced Investigator Grant (AIG) from the European Research Council (ERC) for the "Concurrency Made Easy" project.

The AIG program of the ERC is the most prestigious funding mechanism of the European Union, with a success rate of about 12% out of a set of applicants (well-established researchers) already strictly self-selected by their institutions. Our project is the first one awarded to ETH in computer science since the AIG program was started in 2008. The grant is for approximately 2.5 million euros (3 million CHF) over a period of five years, starting April 2012.

The goal of the project, Concurrency Made Easy, is to contribute a breakthrough advance to software engineering by making concurrent programming as straightforward and reliable as other forms of programming. The stakes are huge, since with the end of Moore's Law as we knew it the only path to further performance improvements is through the use of concurrent architectures, but the commonly used techniques, such as multithreading mechanisms in common programming languages, remain at an unduly low level of abstraction, making them hard to use and leading to unreliable programs.

The project description is available here. We will shortly publish position announcements for postdocs, PhD students and a research engineer.