1,401 research outputs found
Symbolic Partial-Order Execution for Testing Multi-Threaded Programs
We describe a technique for systematic testing of multi-threaded programs. We
combine Quasi-Optimal Partial-Order Reduction, a state-of-the-art technique
that tackles path explosion due to interleaving non-determinism, with symbolic
execution to handle data non-determinism. Our technique iteratively and
exhaustively finds all executions of the program. It represents program
executions using partial orders and finds the next execution using an
underlying unfolding semantics. We avoid the exploration of redundant program
traces using cutoff events. We implemented our technique as an extension of
KLEE and evaluated it on a set of large multi-threaded C programs. Our
experiments found several previously undiscovered bugs and undefined behaviors
in memcached and GNU sort, showing that the new method is capable of finding
bugs in industrial-size benchmarks.Comment: Extended version of a paper presented at CAV'2
Security-Oriented Formal Techniques
Security of software systems is a critical issue in a world where Information Technology is becoming more and more pervasive. The number of services for everyday life that are provided via electronic networks is rapidly increasing, as witnessed by the longer and longer list of words with the prefix "e", such as e-banking, e-commerce, e-government, where the "e" substantiates their electronic nature. These kinds of services usually require the exchange of sensible data and the sharing of computational resources, thus needing strong security requirements because of the relevance of the exchanged information and the very distributed and untrusted environment, the Internet, in which they operate. It is important, for example, to ensure the authenticity and the secrecy of the exchanged messages, to establish the identity of the involved entities, and to have guarantees that the different system components correctly interact, without violating the required global properties
Assessing load-sharing within optimistic simulation platforms
The advent of multi-core machines has lead to the need for revising the architecture of modern simulation platforms. One recent proposal we made attempted to explore the viability of load-sharing for optimistic simulators run on top of these types of machines. In this article, we provide an extensive experimental study for an assessment of the effects on run-time dynamics by a load-sharing architecture that has been implemented within the ROOT-Sim package, namely an open source simulation platform adhering to the optimistic synchronization paradigm. This experimental study is essentially aimed at evaluating possible sources of overheads when supporting load-sharing. It has been based on differentiated workloads allowing us to generate different execution profiles in terms of, e.g., granularity/locality of the simulation events. © 2012 IEEE
Load sharing for optimistic parallel simulations on multicore machines
Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) is based on the partitioning of the simulation model into distinct Logical Processes (LPs), each one modeling a portion of the entire system, which are allowed to execute simulation events concurrently. This allows exploiting parallel computing architectures to speedup model execution, and to make very large models tractable. In this article we cope with the optimistic approach to PDES, where LPs are allowed to concurrently process their events in a speculative fashion, and rollback/ recovery techniques are used to guarantee state consistency in case of causality violations along the speculative execution path. Particularly, we present an innovative load sharing approach targeted at optimizing resource usage for fruitful simulation work when running an optimistic PDES environment on top of multi-processor/multi-core machines. Beyond providing the load sharing model, we also define a load sharing oriented architectural scheme, based on a symmetric multi-threaded organization of the simulation platform. Finally, we present a real implementation of the load sharing architecture within the open source ROme OpTimistic Simulator (ROOT-Sim) package. Experimental data for an assessment of both viability and effectiveness of our proposal are presented as well. Copyright is held by author/owner(s)
An Algebra of Synchronous Scheduling Interfaces
In this paper we propose an algebra of synchronous scheduling interfaces
which combines the expressiveness of Boolean algebra for logical and functional
behaviour with the min-max-plus arithmetic for quantifying the non-functional
aspects of synchronous interfaces. The interface theory arises from a
realisability interpretation of intuitionistic modal logic (also known as
Curry-Howard-Isomorphism or propositions-as-types principle). The resulting
algebra of interface types aims to provide a general setting for specifying
type-directed and compositional analyses of worst-case scheduling bounds. It
covers synchronous control flow under concurrent, multi-processing or
multi-threading execution and permits precise statements about exactness and
coverage of the analyses supporting a variety of abstractions. The paper
illustrates the expressiveness of the algebra by way of some examples taken
from network flow problems, shortest-path, task scheduling and worst-case
reaction times in synchronous programming.Comment: In Proceedings FIT 2010, arXiv:1101.426
Maintaining consistency in distributed systems
In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability
A debugging engine for parallel and distributed programs
Dissertação apresentada para a obtenção
do Grau de Doutor em Informática pela
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade
de Ciências e Tecnologia.In the last decade a considerable amount of research work has focused on distributed
debugging, one of the crucial fields in the parallel software development cycle. The
productivity of the software development process strongly depends on the adequate
definition of what debugging tools should be provided, and what debugging methodologies
and functionalities should these tools support.
The work described in this dissertation was initiated in 1995, in the context of two
research projects, the SEPP (Software Engineering for Parallel Processing) and HPCTI
(High-Performance Computing Tools for Industry), both sponsored by the European
Union in the Copernicus programme, which aimed at the design and implementation
of an integrated parallel software development environment. In the context of these
projects, two independent toolsets have been developed, the GRADE and EDPEPPS
parallel software development environments.
Our contribution to these projects was in the debugging support. We have designed
a debugging engine and developed a prototype, which was integrated the both
toolsets (it was the only tool developed in the context of the SEPP and HPCTI projects
which achieved such a result). Even after the closing of those research projects, further
research work on distributed debugger has been carried on, which conducted to the
re-design and re-implementation of the debugging engine.
This dissertation describes the debugging engine according to its most up-to-date
design and implementation stages. It also reposts some of the experimentalworkmade
with both the initial and the current implementations, and how it contributed to validate
the design and implementations of the debugging engine
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
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