New Request for Proposal: Phoenix and SSCLI Compilation and Managed Execution

Microsoft Research External Research and Programs is pleased to announce a new worldwide Request For Proposals (RFP): Phoenix and SSCLI: Compilation and Managed Execution. Proposals will be accepted until January 17, 2006 at Noon (PDT, -8 UTC/GMT). For full details, guidelines, and instructions, please click here

Overview and Objectives:

This RFP seeks to encourage first-rate cross-cutting and cross-fertilizing research that examines and reconsiders the relationships between development tools, compilers, managed runtime environments, runtime code generation, and underlying operating systems. It is an opportunity for you to work with key technologies at the heart of Microsoft’s .NET architecture.

The emergence of managed code, managed execution and virtual machines is a key trend in modern systems. It significantly changes the way we look at the lifetime of code, from generation to execution in a variety of runtime contexts, and the issues and opportunities that arise as we move further from the classical static compile-link-run model of code generation and execution.

Microsoft has made significant investments in the these areas evidenced by the emergence of the language-neutral .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR), the .NET Framework, the C# and VB.NET programming languages, and the availability of Phoenix and SSCLI. Phoenix – still in an early phase of development — is Microsoft’s next generation code generation, optimization, and analysis framework; and SSCLI — the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure — is a research-oriented portable implementation of the ECMA/ISO-standard technologies upon which .NET is based, including the virtual machine, C# compiler, core .NET Framework libraries, and a rich set of tools, test suites, tutorials, and documentation.

Based on growing interest in SSCLI and Phoenix, the availability of new editions of SSCLI and the Phoenix Research Development Kit (RDK) in early 2006, and the high level of interest in previous RFP’s, this RFP will target projects both for Phoenix and SSCLI. To be clear, while we encourage projects that leverage both Phoenix and SSCLI, we welcome exceptional proposals that focus their attention on one technology or the other.

Microsoft Research will use this RFP as a means to support leading-edge work which looks past the status quo and imagines new and different relationships between the various components that transform source code into running programs. It will also permit us to assess and improve the value of Phoenix and SSCLI for the research and teaching communities.