Critical Software (Portugal)

Critical Software was founded in 1998 as a Spin-off company with core competencies in dependability of IS/IT. The mission of the company is to develop software products for mission and business critical systems, and provide consulting and engineering services on dependability of IS/IT. Critical Software services comprise mission and business critical IS planning and development, software advanced testing, and dependability consulting/auditing, among others. The company also develops and markets packaged products for the dependability and high-performance market. Some examples are WinFT- Windows Fault Tolerance, and Xception – Advanced System Evaluation by Fault Injection. Critical Engineers and researchers include a large number of Phd's and Msc's with a solid know-how on dependability, DBMS's, clustering, parallel/distributed systems, and computer networks. Critical Software is strongly committed to make investments on R&D and currently has around 10 persons involved directly with research activity.

Xception has been used to evaluate parallel computer software from Parsytec Gmbh, Database reliability (Oracle) and embedded real-time space-borne computers by NASA's Jet propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, USA. Critical Software will customise and deploy the Xception technology as well as play a central role in the exploitation of the forthcoming technology.

Relevant publications

D. Costa, T. Rilho and H. Madeira, “Joint Evaluation of Performance and Robustness of a COTS DBMS through Fault-Injection”, Proc. International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2000), New York, USA, June 25-28, 2000, pp. 251-260 (IEEE CS Press).
J. Carreira and D. Costa, “Dependability Evaluation, Validation, and Testing of Safety Critical Aerospace Systems", Proc. Dasia'99, Data Systems In Aerospace Conference, Hotel Altis, Lisbon, Portugal, 1999, pp. 267-271.
D. Costa and H. Madeira, “Experimental Assessment of COTS DBMS Robustness under Transient Faults”, Proc. Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC'99), Hong-Kong, China, December 16-17, 1999, pp. 201-208.
D. Costa, J. Carreira, J. Gabriel, “WinFT: Using Off-the-shelf Computers on Industrial Environments,” Proc. 6th International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, 1997, pp. 39-44, (IEEE CS Press)..
J. Carreira, H. Madeira, J. G. Silva, "Xception: A technique for the evaluation of dependability in modern Computers", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 24, No. 2, February 1998, pp. 125-136.
D. Costa, F. Moreira, H. Madeira, M .Rela and J.G. Silva, “Experimental Evaluation of the Impact of Processor Faults on Parallel Applications”, IEEE 14th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS’14), November 1995, .

CVs of Key persons to be involved

João Viegas Carreira was born in 1968 and is co-founder and CEO of Critical Software Lda, a software startup company headquartered in Coimbra, Portugal, with offices in San Jose, California, US. João Viegas Carreira received his PhD in Computer from the University of Coimbra in 1999. His PhD work is focused on fault-tolerance, dependability evaluation, and parallel programming, an area where he authored more than twenty papers and which currently represents his research interests. He also holds a MBA in Technology and Science Commercialisation from the University of Texas, Austin, USA and a MsC in Computer Engineering from the University of Coimbra.

Diamantino Jose Goncalves Costa was born in 1970 and is co-founder and Vice-President of Critical Software Lda. He is also Xception Product Manager. He is research assistant in the Dependable Systems Group at the Center for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC) since 1993. He is working towards his PhD aimed at the evaluation of dependability in database management systems (DBMS). He holds a Msc in Computer Systems Architecture from the University of Coimbra.