PURPL

Software is eating the world. Every portion of the economy is being fundamentally affected by the software that runs industrial processes, manages our social lives, directs the operations of road and rail networks, and undergirds the computing systems that are ubiquitous. The design of this software is being shaped by challenges across the computing landscape: the desire for artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy, the need to protect operations and data from malicious actors, and the ever-changing computational substrates on which we run this software (from hardware accelerators to quantum computers).

Research conducted at Purdue provides both the theoretical foundations and the practical know-how to tackle these challenges, from building robust, efficient, explainable AI systems; to creating secure-by-design software that is resistant to cyberattack; to developing the systems substrates that make modern software fast, energy-efficient and secure.

The Purdue Center for Programming Principles and Software Systems (PurPL) brings together two dozen researchers from programming languages, AI and machine learning, security and cryptography, computer architecture, and application domains to push this research forward.

Jumpstarted in 2019 with a $10 million grant from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to build the programming languages and systems needed to create secure distributed software, PurPL is now a self-sustaining research center driven by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Energy, as well as generous support from Facebook and Microsoft.

PurPL’s industrial consortium provides more than $200,000 per year to sustain the operations of the center independent of sponsored research projects. PurPL runs a weekly seminar series with internal and external speakers. The center provides seed grants for high-risk, high-reward projects. In addition, PurPL supports travel to conferences by its students, and summer internships for undergraduates who want to participate in PurPL research.

In September of 2019, PurPL was launched with PurPL Fest, a public symposium for research in PurPL-related fields. This symposium, which was co-located with the Midwest Programming Languages Summit (a yearly workshop started by PurPL faculty), brought in a half-dozen high-profile external speakers from academia and industry, and featured talks by PurPL faculty about ongoing research projects. This symposium was attended by more than 200 participants, from two dozen universities and companies. The past two years, PurPL has held annual symposia with virtual workshops highlighting PurPL researchers and industrial partners.

PurPL researchers continue to push the frontiers of software systems research, with advances including efforts to build safe and secure distributed systems, automatically optimize engineering simulation codes for modern hardware, make cryptographically secure computation more efficient, and create the next generation of programming languages for machine learning and data science.