MPI-SWS Scientific Director Rupak Majumdar has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant worth approximately €2.5 million for his project „Pascal: Formal Performance Analysis at Scale“. The project aims to develop new mathematical foundations and practical tools for analyzing and verifying the performance and resilience of large-scale distributed computer systems.

Whether it is online banking, email, video streaming, global cloud platforms, or large-scale AI infrastructures – planetary-scale distributed systems form the backbone of many societal-scale applications. We take for granted the continuous availability of these services, even though outages can cause widespread disruption. Yet today, developers do not have principled approaches to provision, analyze, or prove performance or resilience properties of such systems. Currently, developers test for such properties using expensive but inadequate workload testing, and availability outages continue to be a problem for users.

The now EU-funded project "Pascal: Formal Performance Analysis at Scale" addresses the major challenge of formally reasoning about (that is, mathematically describing and verifying) the performance and resilience of large-scale distributed systems. Its ultimate goal is to develop methodologies and tools that system developers can use to reason about implementations of their systems.

Rupak Majumdar has been a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems since 2010 and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Rhineland-Palatinate University of Technology Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU). This is the second ERC grant he has received. In 2015, together with Michael Backes, Peter Druschel, and Gerhard Weikum, he was awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for the project ImPACT: Privacy, Accountability, Compliance, and Trust in Tomorrow’s Internet. The ERC Synergy Grant is the European Research Council’s most highly funded grant scheme.

More info from the ERC.

Mario Günzel, a postdoctoral researcher in the Real-Time Systems group, has been recognized with the 2024–2025 ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award. The award, first given in 2013, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems, in the spirit and legacy of Dr. Paul Caspi’s work. Mario Günzel's thesis, entitled Property-Based Timing Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Systems, was advised by Prof. Jian-Jia Chen at TU Dortmund.