Ada Resource Association

AdaCore and Altran have announced their renewed sponsorship of the annual High Integrity Software Conference, which takes place in Bristol on 1 November 2016. The conference programme can be found at www.his-2016.co.uk/programme; it covers many topics including security, autonomy, standards and techniques & tools.

NEW YORK, PARIS, & BATH, United Kingdom–Today, AdaCore and Altran announced a new space application for the GNAT Pro technology and SPARK language toolset, with the successful launch of Vermont Technical College’s Lunar CubeSat. The tiny satellite, measuring only 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm and weighing 1.1 kg, was launched into a 500 km earth orbit, where it will remain for about three years to test the systems that will be used for the eventual lunar mission. The CubeSat project is part of NASA’s ELaNa IV program (Educational Launch of Nano-satellites).

The CubeSat’s navigation and control software was developed in SPARK/Ada using AdaCore’s GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) IDE and GNAT Pro compiler and exploiting Altran’s SPARK toolset to prove the absence of run-time errors. The software was developed at Vermont Technical College by a team of undergraduate students under the direction of Dr. Peter Chapin. Although they had no previous knowledge of SPARK or Ada, the students came up to speed quickly and were able to take advantage of SPARK’s various annotations to produce robust code.

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AdaCore and its research partners today announced the successful completion of Project Hi-Lite, a three-year, €3.9 million effort aimed at popularizing formal methods in the development of high integrity software by combining formal verification and testing. Hi-Lite took advantage of Airbus’ decade-long experience using formal verification methods to create high integrity systems, and leveraged the powerful industrial tools already developed by the project partners. The work was sponsored by the French Government and the General Council of the Département of Essonne and was conducted by a partnership comprising AdaCore, Altran, Astrium Space Transportation, CEA List, INRIA Toccata and Thales Communications. Hi-Lite’s main goal was to make formal verification faster and easier to use across large, multi-language projects that need to meet safety certification criteria, and the project has successfully achieved this objective. “Hi-Lite has allowed us to take advanced program proving technology that was developed in academia and adapt it for industrial use,” said Yannick Moy, Hi-Lite Project Manager at AdaCore. “The project has shown that formal verification can complement testing and play a prominent and practical role in verifying critical software.”

The SPARK Pro 11 software development and verification environment has been released, providing a major step forward for the developers of high-assurance systems. SPARK Pro 11 offers many enhancements particularly in the area of program proof.

The SPARK language shown to have fewest vulnerabilities.

AdaCore has released an open source reference implementation of the Skein cryptographic hashing algorithm implemented in SPARK.

Praxis and AdaCore launch SPARK GPL, which makes the SPARK technology available under the GNU Public License (GPL). This brings a professional-grade toolset for high-assurance and safety-critical software development to the academic community and developers of Free Software.