Formal methods for surviving the jungle of heterogeneous parallelism

The parallel programming community will soon be entering the ‘jungle' of heterogeneous hardware and software. Unfortunately, we are not adequately preparing future programmers (today's students) to cope with the many challenges of heterogeneous concurrency, especially in their ability to rigorously specify and verify concurrent systems. Concerted action is urgently needed to create a body of education material supplemented by effective software tools that help gain working knowledge of specification and verification techniques. We suggest funding models and incentives that can help create this material and put them into wide practice.