GrammaTech Begins Work on Advanced Analysis Engine for DARPA’s PLINY Project

ITHACA, NY – GrammaTech, Inc., a leading maker of tools that improve and accelerate software development, today announced it has begun work on PLINY, a technology to automatically detect program defects, suggest program repairs, and complete program drafts based on code and specifications mined from vast repositories of existing code. PLINY is part of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE) program, an initiative that seeks to gather hundreds of billions of lines of publicly available open-source computer code to mine in an effort to create a searchable database of properties, behaviors, and vulnerabilities. PLINY is a joint effort among GrammaTech, Rice University, the University of Texas-Austin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“If successful, PLINY has the potential to be a transformative technology,” said David Melski, VP of Research at GrammaTech. “It has the potential to change the way programming is done, the way programming is taught, and who does programming. It could give the power to express computation to people who don’t currently have it.”

GrammaTech’s role in the PLINY project focuses on analyzing code to extract program elements that represent computational paradigms, as well as identifying syntactic and semantic features that characterize the program elements. Accurate identification and characterization of program elements is essential to enabling organization and search of PLINY’s code database. GrammaTech’s CodeSonar static analysis tool will be at the center of the effort to generate features. CodeSonar provides extraordinary scalability, an ability to analyze diverse code samples, and an analysis engine with proven capabilities for discovering subtle program properties. For more information about the PLINY project, visit DARPA’s MUSE page.