The work of Petr Hošek and Cristian Cadar here in DoC on how to update software without stress or disruption has appeared in this months New Scientist

Update your software without stress or disruption

Petr Hošek a PhD student here in the Department of Computing and his supervisor Dr Cristian Cadar have both appeared in a New Scientist article featuring their work on employing unused cores in "multicore" microprocessors to update software.

Downloading and installing software updates can be a time consuming and stressful business. Petr and Cristian's solution to this problem is to leave the old version of the software running on one core  while running the update in parallel on an another core. This allows the user to continue using it whilst the installation takes place. The installation synchronizes the two programs in such a way that only the most reliable, dependable parts of the two programs run. This reduces the risk of introducing bugs and increases the overall reliability and security of the software and installation process.

There research  was presented last month at  the International Conference on Software Engineering in San Francisco.

To read the full article see http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23690-update-your-software-without-stress-or-disruption.html#.UcMOx5zZV8F