Haiping Xu, PhD

Concepts and techniques for parallel and distributed software systems. The course examines concurrent programming models and the design of mission-critical software systems. Topics include the relationship between concurrency and distributed processing, shared-memory and message-passing paradigms, and contemporary standards for building reliable and high-performance systems. Implementation challenges such as synchronization, communication overhead, and system scalability are also addressed.

Theoretical basis of the development of computer science. The course details particular formalisms used in the design of hardware and software systems. Intrinsic limitations of computation are described. Advanced topics of automata theory and analysis of algorithms are included. The course also covers Turing machines, the halting problem, models of computation, intractable computations, polynomial reductions, P vs. NP, parallel algorithms, various formal descriptions and specifications of programs and computations, and proofs of program correctness and interactive proof systems.

Prerequisites: Completion of three core courses.   Development of a detailed, significant project in computer science under the close supervision of a faculty member, perhaps as one member of a student team. This project may be a software implementation, a design effort, or a theoretical or practical written analysis. Project report with optional oral presentation must be evaluated by three faculty members including the project supervisor.