ESP: A Language for Programmable Devices.

Sanjeev Kumar.

As Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University. Available as Princeton University Technical Report TR-646-02, January 2002.

Paper: pdf [0.48MB ], ps [0.31MB ], pdf-2up [0.42MB ], ps-2up [0.31MB ]
Talk: ppt

This thesis presents the design and implementation of Event-driven State-machines Programming~(ESP)---a language for programmable devices. In traditional languages, like C, using event-driven state machines forces a tradeoff that requires giving up ease of programming and reliability to achieve high performance. ESP is designed to provide all of these three properties simultaneously.

ESP provides a comprehensive set of features to support development of compact and modular programs. The ESP compiler compiles the programs into two targets---a C file that can be used to generate efficient firmware for the device; and a model that can be used by a model-checking verifier like Spin to extensively test the firmware.

As a case study, we reimplemented VMMC firmware that runs on Myrinet network interface cards using ESP. We found that ESP simplifies the task of programming with event-driven state machines. It required an order of magnitude fewer lines of code than the earlier implementation. We also found that model-checking verifiers like Spin can be used to effectively debug the firmware. Our measurements show that the performance impact on applications of using ESP is small.