MPI-SWS Scientific Director Rupak Majumdar 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.

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). This is the second ERC grant he has received. In 2015, together with Michael Backes, Peter Druschel, and Gerhard Weikum, he was awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for the project ImPACT: Privacy, Accountability, Compliance, and Trust in Tomorrow’s Internet. The ERC Synergy Grant is the European Research Council’s most highly funded grant scheme.

More info from the ERC.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) has awarded their 2026 Distinguished Service Award to MPI-SWS Scientific Director Derek Dreyer. The award citation reads as follows:

Derek Dreyer has set an exemplary standard of service within the PL community. Throughout the years, Derek has served in almost every possible role in our community, including General Chair of ICFP’19, Program Chair of POPL’24, and Associate Chair of OOPSLA’23 and PLDI’26. Since 2017, he is an Associate Editor of TOPLAS; since 2023, he is on the PACMPL advisory board; and since 2022, he is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Functional Programming, presently overseeing the transfer of the journal to Diamond Open Access. But Derek’s service work began much earlier. While still an assistant professor, he was moderator of the TYPES mailing list and volunteered to serve on the SIGPLAN Executive Committee (2012-15) as Awards Chair. In 2020, he helped safeguard the perception of programming languages research outside the field, when the CORE ranking committee threatened to demote the rankings of several major PL conferences. Derek has also been a prominent mentor for students, postdocs, and junior faculty. He chaired early editions of PLMW and co-founded the RTFM workshop on faculty mentoring (at PLDI’24 and POPL’26). He frequently speaks at such events, and is known for his widely-cited talks on speaking and writing skills: “How to Write Papers and Give Talks That People Can Follow”. Last but not least, Derek has written popular blog posts touching on the more “human” aspects of a career in research such as: accepting criticism, handling rejection, struggling to maintain a work-life balance, and impostor syndrome. In summary, Derek has served the community in many ways, always striving to promote the value and the quality of PL research, to help maintain cohesion in our community, and to empower junior researchers to conduct outstanding PL research.

The Distinguished Service Award is given by ACM SIGPLAN to recognize distinguished service contributions to the Programming Languages Community. The award recognizes contributions to ACM SIGPLAN, its conferences, publications, or its local activities. The award includes a prize of $2,500.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) have authored a total of 5 papers accepted to POPL 2026.  This is the ninth year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL.

Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

• A Verified High-Performance Composable Object Library for Remote Direct Memory Access
  Guillaume Ambal, George Hodgkins, Mark Madler, Gregory Chockler, Brijesh Dongol, Joe Izraelevitz, Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis


• Bounded Treewidth, Multiple Context-Free Grammars, and Downward ClosuresRemote
  C. Aiswarya, Pascal Baumann, Prakash Saivasan, Lia Schütze, Georg Zetzsche


• Endangered by the Language But Saved by the Compiler: Robust Safety via Semantic Back-Translation
  Niklas Mück, Aina Linn Georges, Derek Dreyer, Deepak Garg, Michael Sammler


• General Decidability Results for Systems with Continuous Counters
  A. R. Balasubramanian, Matthew Hague, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche


• Verifying Almost-Sure Termination for Randomized Distributed Algorithms
  Constantin Enea, Rupak Majumdar, Harshit Jitendra Motwani, V.R. Sathiyanarayana