CMU-CS-04-104
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-04-104

Foundational Typed Assembly Language for Grid Computing

Joseph C. Vanderwaart, Karl Crary

Feburary 2004

CMU-CS-04-104.ps
CMU-CS-04-104.pdf


Keywords: Certified code, type theory, typed assembly language, distributed computing, resource bound certification.


This report describes a type theory for certified code, called TALT-R, in which type safety guarantees cooperation with a mechanism to limit the CPU usage of untrusted code. At its core is the foundational typed assembly language TALT, extended with an instruction-counting mechanism, or "virtual clock", intended to bound the number of non-yielding instructions a program may execute in a row. The type theory also contains a form of dependent refinement that allows reasoning about integer values to be reflected in the typing of a program; in particular, the refinement system enables a simple but effective dynamic checking scheme for the clock, which we predict will greatly improve the performance of TALT-R programs. We exhibit a translation from a clock-ignorant source language into a form of TALT-R, demonstrating that the type system is expressive enough to write general programs in.

62 pages


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