32,849 research outputs found
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
Model-driven performance evaluation for service engineering
Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an
integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Software quality aspects such as performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of
measuring and calculating performance metrics of the implemented software. We present an approach for the empirical, model-based performance evaluation of services and service compositions in the context of model-driven service engineering. Temporal databases theory is utilised
for the empirical performance evaluation of model-driven developed service systems
Validation of hardware events for successful performance pattern identification in High Performance Computing
Hardware performance monitoring (HPM) is a crucial ingredient of performance
analysis tools. While there are interfaces like LIKWID, PAPI or the kernel
interface perf\_event which provide HPM access with some additional features,
many higher level tools combine event counts with results retrieved from other
sources like function call traces to derive (semi-)automatic performance
advice. However, although HPM is available for x86 systems since the early 90s,
only a small subset of the HPM features is used in practice. Performance
patterns provide a more comprehensive approach, enabling the identification of
various performance-limiting effects. Patterns address issues like bandwidth
saturation, load imbalance, non-local data access in ccNUMA systems, or false
sharing of cache lines. This work defines HPM event sets that are best suited
to identify a selection of performance patterns on the Intel Haswell processor.
We validate the chosen event sets for accuracy in order to arrive at a reliable
pattern detection mechanism and point out shortcomings that cannot be easily
circumvented due to bugs or limitations in the hardware
ChimpCheck: Property-Based Randomized Test Generation for Interactive Apps
We consider the problem of generating relevant execution traces to test rich
interactive applications. Rich interactive applications, such as apps on mobile
platforms, are complex stateful and often distributed systems where
sufficiently exercising the app with user-interaction (UI) event sequences to
expose defects is both hard and time-consuming. In particular, there is a
fundamental tension between brute-force random UI exercising tools, which are
fully-automated but offer low relevance, and UI test scripts, which are manual
but offer high relevance. In this paper, we consider a middle way---enabling a
seamless fusion of scripted and randomized UI testing. This fusion is
prototyped in a testing tool called ChimpCheck for programming, generating, and
executing property-based randomized test cases for Android apps. Our approach
realizes this fusion by offering a high-level, embedded domain-specific
language for defining custom generators of simulated user-interaction event
sequences. What follows is a combinator library built on industrial strength
frameworks for property-based testing (ScalaCheck) and Android testing (Android
JUnit and Espresso) to implement property-based randomized testing for Android
development. Driven by real, reported issues in open source Android apps, we
show, through case studies, how ChimpCheck enables expressing effective testing
patterns in a compact manner.Comment: 20 pages, 21 figures, Symposium on New ideas, New Paradigms, and
Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!2017
Formal Verification of Probabilistic SystemC Models with Statistical Model Checking
Transaction-level modeling with SystemC has been very successful in
describing the behavior of embedded systems by providing high-level executable
models, in which many of them have inherent probabilistic behaviors, e.g.,
random data and unreliable components. It thus is crucial to have both
quantitative and qualitative analysis of the probabilities of system
properties. Such analysis can be conducted by constructing a formal model of
the system under verification and using Probabilistic Model Checking (PMC).
However, this method is infeasible for large systems, due to the state space
explosion. In this article, we demonstrate the successful use of Statistical
Model Checking (SMC) to carry out such analysis directly from large SystemC
models and allow designers to express a wide range of useful properties. The
first contribution of this work is a framework to verify properties expressed
in Bounded Linear Temporal Logic (BLTL) for SystemC models with both timed and
probabilistic characteristics. Second, the framework allows users to expose a
rich set of user-code primitives as atomic propositions in BLTL. Moreover,
users can define their own fine-grained time resolution rather than the
boundary of clock cycles in the SystemC simulation. The third contribution is
an implementation of a statistical model checker. It contains an automatic
monitor generation for producing execution traces of the
model-under-verification (MUV), the mechanism for automatically instrumenting
the MUV, and the interaction with statistical model checking algorithms.Comment: Journal of Software: Evolution and Process. Wiley, 2017. arXiv admin
note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1507.0818
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