by Paul Butcher

13 entries tagged with #AWS
Part of AdaCore's ongoing efforts under the HICLASS project is to demonstrate how the SPARK technology can play an integral part in the security-hardening of existing software libraries written in other non-security-oriented programming languages such as C. This blog post presents the first white paper under this work-stream, “Security-Hardening Software Libraries with Ada and SPARK”.
For nearly four decades the Ada language (in all versions of the standard) has been helping developers meet the most stringent reliability, safety and security requirements in the embedded market. As such, Ada has become an entrenched player in its historic A&D niche, where its technical advantages are recognized and well understood. Ada has also seen usage in other domains (such as medical and transportation) but its penetration has progressed at a somewhat slower pace. In these other markets Ada stands in particular contrast with the C language, which, although suffering from extremely well known and documented flaws, remains a strong and seldom questioned default choice. Or at least, when it’s not the choice, C is still the starting point (a gateway drug?) for alternatives such as C++ or Java, which in the end still lack the software engineering benefits that Ada embodies..
In Part 1 of this blog post I discussed why I chose to implement this application using the Ada Web Server to serve the computed fractal to a web browser. In this part I will discuss a bit more about the backend of the application, the Ada part.
I started out as an electronic musician, so one of my original motivations when I learnt programming was so that I could eventually *program* the sounds I wanted rather than just use already existing software to do it.
Forget about the black box - we want you to see what's in the AdaCore box! Our machine room, the life blood of the company, is centered in the office space in a glass box and is pure eye candy for geeks and cable aficionados. The machine room is 204 sq ft (19 sq meters), contains 73 machines (running the gamut from VxWorks, Linux, Windows, Android and more) 1.5 miles of cables and a state of the art fire suppression mechanism! Oh and the modern air intake system gives it a green energy seal of approval. In the unlikely event of a fire; the smoke detectors allow 30 seconds before dispersing an agent called FM200 which will suppress the fire but not damage the equipment. The economizer takes advantage of winters' freeze and draws cool air from the outside to cool the machine room and the heated air is then spilled to common office areas thus reducing heating costs. We're proud to show-off the hardware side of our software!