NDetermin: Inferring Nondeterministic Sequential Specifications for Parallelism Correctness

Burnim, Jacob; Elmas, Tayfun; Necula, George C.; Sen, Koushik

doi:10.21236/ada555872

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Other parallel error checking tools are geared to find concurrency bugs [2,8,15]. Some runtime error checking approaches require support built into hardware [4,7,14,16,30].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Runtime checking C programs

Milewicz

Vanka

Tuck

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

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The C Programming Language is known for being an efficient language that can be compiled on almost any architecture and operating system. However the absence of dynamic safety checks and a relatively weak type system allows programmer oversights that are hard to spot. In this paper, we present RTC, a runtime monitoring tool that instruments unsafe code and monitors the program execution. RTC is built on top of the ROSE compiler infrastructure. RTC finds memory bugs and arithmetic overflows and underflows, and run-time type violations. Most of the instrumentations are directly added to the source file and only require a minimal runtime system. As a result, the instrumented code remains portable. In tests against known error detection benchmarks, RTC found 98% of all memory related bugs and had zero false positives. In performance tests conducted with well known algorithms, such as binary search and MD5, we determined that the unoptimized overhead rate is between a factor of 1.8 and a factor of 77 respectively.

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“…Other parallel error checking tools are geared to find concurrency bugs [2,8,15]. Some runtime error checking approaches require support built into hardware [4,7,14,16,30].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Runtime checking C programs

Milewicz

Vanka

Tuck

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We refer the reader to [10] and references therein for a discussion of specification, verification and testing tools designed for nondeterministic codes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning nondeterminism into parallelism

Tripp

Koskinen

Sagiv

2013

Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages &Amp; Application

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Nondeterminism is a useful and prevalent concept in the design and implementation of software systems. An important property of nondeterminism is its latent parallelism: A nondeterministic action can evaluate to multiple behaviors. If at least one of these behaviors does not conflict with concurrent tasks, then there is an admissible execution of the action in parallel with these tasks. Unfortunately, existing implementations of the atomic paradigm-optimistic as well as pessimistic-are unable to fully exhaust the parallelism potential of nondeterministic actions, lacking the means to guide concurrent tasks toward nondeterministic choices that minimize interference. This paper investigates the problem of utilizing parallelism due to nondeterminism. We observe that nondeterminism occurs in many real-world codes. We motivate the need for devising coordination mechanisms that can utilize available nondeterminism. We have developed a system featuring such mechanisms, which leverages nondeterminism in a wide class of query operations, allowing a task to look into the future of concurrent tasks that mutate the shared state during query evaluation and reduce conflict accordingly. We evaluate our system on a suite of 12 algorithmic benchmarks of wide applicability, as well as an industrial application. The results are encouraging.

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“…LINEUP is a dynamic analysis tool that flags a concurrent behavior when it outputs a value that no sequential execution produced [4]. Burnim et al [5] provide runtime techniques to check parallel implementations against non-deterministic sequential specifications. Siegel et al [19] employ symbolic execution along with enumeration of interleavings to check against the sequential behaviors for numerical programs.…”

Section: Sequential Filtersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underspecified harnesses and interleaved bugs

2012

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Static assertion checking of open programs requires setting up a precise harness to capture the environment assumptions. For instance, a library may require a file handle to be properly initialized before it is passed into it. A harness is used to set up or specify the appropriate preconditions before invoking methods from the program. In the absence of a precise harness, even the most precise automated static checkers are bound to report numerous false alarms. This often limits the adoption of static assertion checking in the hands of a user.In this work, we explore the possibility of automatically filtering away (or prioritizing) warnings that result from imprecision in the harness. We limit our attention to the scenario when one is interested in finding bugs due to concurrency. We define a warning to be an interleaved bug when it manifests on an input for which no sequential interleaving produces a warning. As we argue in the paper, limiting a static analysis to only consider interleaved bugs greatly reduces false positives during static concurrency analysis in the presence of an imprecise harness.We formalize interleaved bugs as a differential analysis between the original program and its sequential version and provide various techniques for finding them. Our implementation CBUGS demonstrates that the scheme of finding interleaved bugs can alleviate the need to construct precise harnesses while checking real-life concurrent programs.

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NDetermin: Inferring Nondeterministic Sequential Specifications for Parallelism Correctness

Cited by 5 publications

References 24 publications

Runtime checking C programs

Runtime checking C programs

Turning nondeterminism into parallelism

Underspecified harnesses and interleaved bugs

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