57,307 research outputs found
Static analysis of concurrent objects: May-Happen-in-Parallel fo asynchronous programs with Inter-procedural synchronization
This work presents a may-happen-in-parallel analysis with inter-procedural synchronization for languages based in concurrent objects. In this model of concurrency (based on actors) the objects are the concurrency units. The idea behind it is that each object has its own processor. A may-happen-inparallel (MHP) analysis computes pairs of program points that may execute in parallel across different distributed components. This information has been proven to be essential to infer both safety properties (e.g., deadlock freedom) and liveness properties (termination and resource boundedness) of asynchronous programs. Existing MHP analyses take advantage of the synchronization points to learn that one task has finished and thus will not happen in parallel with other tasks that are still active. Our starting point is an existing MHP analysis developed for intra-procedural synchronization, i.e., it only allows synchronizing with tasks that have been spawned inside the current task. This paper leverages such MHP analysis to handle inter-procedural synchronization, i.e., a task spawned by one task can be awaited within a different task. This is challenging because task synchronization goes beyond the boundaries of methods, and thus the inference of MHP relations requires novel extensions to capture inter- procedural dependencies.
We can distinguish diferent phases in the development of the analysis: (1) The first one where MHF analysis is performed to infer the relations of synchronization that exist between the methods, (2) a second local phase to analyze each method separately and (3) a last phase to composed all information.
As the problem is undecidable when considering a full concurrent objects programming language, the analysis over-approximates the real parallelism programs. Finally, the implementation of the analysis has been integrated in SACO, a static analyzer of concurrent programs.
The main technical results [5] have been selected to be published in the proceedings of Static Analysis Symposium 2015: http://sas2015.inria.fr.
It is the main conference on static analysis (classified as category A in the international ranking CORE)
Life of occam-Pi
This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an āadvancedā subject? Whatās the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockhamās Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoareās CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milnerās ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation ā occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future
Sound Static Deadlock Analysis for C/Pthreads (Extended Version)
We present a static deadlock analysis approach for C/pthreads. The design of
our method has been guided by the requirement to analyse real-world code. Our
approach is sound (i.e., misses no deadlocks) for programs that have defined
behaviour according to the C standard, and precise enough to prove
deadlock-freedom for a large number of programs. The method consists of a
pipeline of several analyses that build on a new context- and thread-sensitive
abstract interpretation framework. We further present a lightweight dependency
analysis to identify statements relevant to deadlock analysis and thus speed up
the overall analysis. In our experimental evaluation, we succeeded to prove
deadlock-freedom for 262 programs from the Debian GNU/Linux distribution with
in total 2.6 MLOC in less than 11 hours
Out-Of-Place debugging: a debugging architecture to reduce debugging interference
Context. Recent studies show that developers spend most of their programming
time testing, verifying and debugging software. As applications become more and
more complex, developers demand more advanced debugging support to ease the
software development process.
Inquiry. Since the 70's many debugging solutions were introduced. Amongst
them, online debuggers provide a good insight on the conditions that led to a
bug, allowing inspection and interaction with the variables of the program.
However, most of the online debugging solutions introduce \textit{debugging
interference} to the execution of the program, i.e. pauses, latency, and
evaluation of code containing side-effects.
Approach. This paper investigates a novel debugging technique called
\outofplace debugging. The goal is to minimize the debugging interference
characteristic of online debugging while allowing online remote capabilities.
An \outofplace debugger transfers the program execution and application state
from the debugged application to the debugger application, both running in
different processes.
Knowledge. On the one hand, \outofplace debugging allows developers to debug
applications remotely, overcoming the need of physical access to the machine
where the debugged application is running. On the other hand, debugging happens
locally on the remote machine avoiding latency. That makes it suitable to be
deployed on a distributed system and handle the debugging of several processes
running in parallel.
Grounding. We implemented a concrete out-of-place debugger for the Pharo
Smalltalk programming language. We show that our approach is practical by
performing several benchmarks, comparing our approach with a classic remote
online debugger. We show that our prototype debugger outperforms by a 1000
times a traditional remote debugger in several scenarios. Moreover, we show
that the presence of our debugger does not impact the overall performance of an
application.
Importance. This work combines remote debugging with the debugging experience
of a local online debugger. Out-of-place debugging is the first online
debugging technique that can minimize debugging interference while debugging a
remote application. Yet, it still keeps the benefits of online debugging ( e.g.
step-by-step execution). This makes the technique suitable for modern
applications which are increasingly parallel, distributed and reactive to
streams of data from various sources like sensors, UI, network, etc
PLACES'10: The 3rd Workshop on Programmng Language Approaches to concurrency and Communication-Centric Software
Paphos, Cyprus. March 201
A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs
The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent
applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate
through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid
concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in
general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs
reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the
patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this
taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to
static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message
protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify
livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be
used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging
techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for
Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added
references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated
citation
- ā¦