Rupak Majumdar awarded ERC Advanced Grant

Rupak Majumdar, Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), 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. RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau extends its congratulations to the internationally recognized researcher on this remarkable success. In addition to his internationally acclaimed research contributions, he is actively engaged as an Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science at RPTU.

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). As an internationally recognized expert in software verification, formal methods, and distributed systems, Rupak Majumdar has helped shape one of the key research strengths of computer science in Kaiserslautern. Through his role at MPI-SWS and his close affiliation with RPTU, he contributes substantially to the integration of university and non-university research excellence, further strengthening the region’s internationally visible research ecosystem.

Source: Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)