CFA2: a Context-Free Approach to Control-Flow Analysis

In a functional language, the dominant control-flow mechanism is function call and return. Most higher-order flow analyses, including k-CFA, do not handle call and return well: they remember only a bounded number of pending calls because they approximate programs with control-flow graphs. Call/return mismatch introduces precision-degrading spurious control-flow paths and increases the analysis time. We describe CFA2, the first flow analysis with precise call/return matching in the presence of higher-order functions and tail calls. We formulate CFA2 as an abstract interpretation of programs in continuation-passing style and describe a sound and complete summarization algorithm for our abstract semantics. A preliminary evaluation shows that CFA2 gives more accurate data-flow information than 0CFA and 1CFA.Comment: LMCS 7 (2:3) 201

Lambda-Dropping: Transforming Recursive Equations into Programs with Block Structure

Lambda-lifting a functional program transforms it into a set of recursiveequations. We present the symmetric transformation: lambda-dropping.Lambda-dropping a set of recursive equations restores blockstructure and lexical scope.For lack of scope, recursive equations must carry around all theparameters that any of their callees might possibly need. Both lambda-liftingand lambda-dropping thus require one to compute a transitiveclosure over the call graph:- for lambda-lifting: to establish the Def/Use path of each freevariable (these free variables are then added as parameters toeach of the functions in the call path);- for lambda-dropping: to establish the Def/Use path of each parameter(parameters whose use occurs in the same scope as theirdefinition do not need to be passed along in the call path).Without free variables, a program is scope-insensitive. Its blocks arethen free to float (for lambda-lifting) or to sink (for lambda-dropping)along the vertices of the scope tree.We believe lambda-lifting and lambda-dropping are interesting perse, both in principle and in practice, but our prime application is partialevaluation: except for Malmkjær and Ørbæk's case study presented atPEPM'95, most polyvariant specializers for procedural programs operateon recursive equations. To this end, in a pre-processing phase,they lambda-lift source programs into recursive equations. As a result,residual programs are also expressed as recursive equations, often withdozens of parameters, which most compilers do not handle efficiently.Lambda-dropping in a post-processing phase restores their block structureand lexical scope thereby significantly reducing both the compiletime and the run time of residual programs.

An Analytical Approach to Programs as Data Objects

This essay accompanies a selection of 32 articles (referred to in bold face in the text and marginally marked in the bibliographic references) submitted to Aarhus University towards a Doctor Scientiarum degree in Computer Science.The author's previous academic degree, beyond a doctoral degree in June 1986, is an "Habilitation à diriger les recherches" from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) in France; the corresponding material was submitted in September 1992 and the degree was obtained in January 1993.The present 32 articles have all been written since 1993 and while at DAIMI.Except for one other PhD student, all co-authors are or have been the author's students here in Aarhus

Portable Checkpointing for Parallel Applications

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems represent the peak of modern computational capability. As ever-increasing demands for computational power have fuelled the demand for ever-larger computing systems, modern HPC systems have grown to incorporate hundreds, thousands or as many as 130,000 processors. At these scales, the huge number of individual components in a single system makes the probability that a single component will fail quite high, with today's large HPC systems featuring mean times between failures on the order of hours or a few days. As many modern computational tasks require days or months to complete, fault tolerance becomes critical to HPC system design. The past three decades have seen significant amounts of research on parallel system fault tolerance. However, as most of it has been either theoretical or has focused on low-level solutions that are embedded into a particular operating system or type of hardware, this work has had little impact on real HPC systems. This thesis attempts to address this lack of impact by describing a high-level approach for implementing checkpoint/restart functionality that decouples the fault tolerance solution from the details of the operating system, system libraries and the hardware and instead connects it to the APIs implemented by the above components. The resulting solution enables applications that use these APIs to become self-checkpointing and self-restarting regardless of the the software/hardware platform that may implement the APIs. The particular focus of this thesis is on the problem of checkpoint/restart of parallel applications. It presents two theoretical checkpointing protocols, one for the message passing communication model and one for the shared memory model. The former is the first protocol to be compatible with application-level checkpointing of individual processes, while the latter is the first protocol that is compatible with arbitrary shared memory models, APIs, implementations and consistency protocols. These checkpointing protocols are used to implement checkpointing systems for applications that use the MPI and OpenMP parallel APIs, respectively, and are first in providing checkpoint/restart to arbitrary implementations of these popular APIs. Both checkpointing systems are extensively evaluated on multiple software/hardware platforms and are shown to feature low overheads