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                              ECE SEMINAR SERIES 2000
                   ___________________________________________
                             THURSDAY, MARCH 9, 2000
                                     4:00 PM
                              Refreshments 3:30 PM
                        Scaife Hall Auditorium, Rm. 125
                   ___________________________________________
                   ``Ballista:  Software Robustness Evaluation''

                                Prof. Philip Koopman
                                   Carnegie Mellon
                        Electrical and Computer Engineering
                                      
                  
                                      ABSTRACT

Many of us accept computer crashes as an inevitable fact of life. But, as our
society increasingly becomes dependent upon computers, it is essential that
we find ways to make software less fragile. A key element to creating more
robust software is being able to test and quantify a system's ability to
handle exceptional conditions gracefully.

The Ballista robustness testing service is a scalable approach to testing
application programming interfaces (APIs) for robust handling of exceptional
parameter values.  Ballista has automatically searched for and identified
numerous problems with exception handling on several commercial systems,
including very simple ways to crash many Unix and Windows operating systems.
Beyond identifying repeatable robustness problems, the Ballista testing
methodology permits quantitative robustness comparisons among competing
software packages. The latest result is a comparison of the relative
robustness of Linux vs. several Windows variants.

The Ballista testing service is publicly available via the Internet at
http://www.ices.cmu.edu/ballista

                                     BIO

Philip Koopman is an Assistant Professor in the Carnegie Mellon ECE
Department and is the thrust leader for Embedded & Reliable Information
Systems at the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems.  Koopman has a
wide range of experiences with embedded systems. He started his career by
having his life depend on embedded systems as a U.S. Navy submarine officer.
After that he moved on to system integration of naval combat computers, and
then was the chief architect for Harris Semiconductor's RTX line of embedded
processors. More recently, he was a principal research engineer at United
Technologies Research Center, working with applications for Otis (elevators),
Pratt & Whitney (jet engines), Norden (RADARs and SONARs), Carrier (HVAC
equipment), UT Automotive (input control electronics), and Sikorsky
(helicopters). Now he is at Carnegie Mellon exploring how to make more
dependable embedded systems.