11,863 research outputs found
Efficient and Reasonable Object-Oriented Concurrency
Making threaded programs safe and easy to reason about is one of the chief
difficulties in modern programming. This work provides an efficient execution
model for SCOOP, a concurrency approach that provides not only data race
freedom but also pre/postcondition reasoning guarantees between threads. The
extensions we propose influence both the underlying semantics to increase the
amount of concurrent execution that is possible, exclude certain classes of
deadlocks, and enable greater performance. These extensions are used as the
basis an efficient runtime and optimization pass that improve performance 15x
over a baseline implementation. This new implementation of SCOOP is also 2x
faster than other well-known safe concurrent languages. The measurements are
based on both coordination-intensive and data-manipulation-intensive benchmarks
designed to offer a mixture of workloads.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software
Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of
Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE '15). ACM, 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
Detection of Asynchronous Message Passing Errors Using Static Analysis
Concurrent programming is hard and prone to subtle errors. In this paper we present a static analysis that is able to detect some commonly occurring kinds of message passing errors in languages with dynamic process creation and communication based on asynchronous message passing. Our analysis is completely automatic, fast, and strikes a proper balance between soundness and completeness: it is effective in detecting errors and avoids false alarms by computing a close approximation of the interprocess communication topology of programs. We have integrated our analysis in dialyzer, a widely used tool for detecting software defects in Erlang programs, and demonstrate its effectiveness on libraries and applications of considerable size. Despite the fact that these applications have been developed over a long period of time and are reasonably well-tested, our analysis has managed to detect a significant number of previously unknown message passing errors in their code
Static Safety for an Actor Dedicated Process Calculus by Abstract Interpretation
The actor model eases the definition of concurrent programs with non uniform
behaviors. Static analysis of such a model was previously done in a data-flow
oriented way, with type systems. This approach was based on constraint set
resolution and was not able to deal with precise properties for communications
of behaviors. We present here a new approach, control-flow oriented, based on
the abstract interpretation framework, able to deal with communication of
behaviors. Within our new analyses, we are able to verify most of the previous
properties we observed as well as new ones, principally based on occurrence
counting
A Case Study in Coordination Programming: Performance Evaluation of S-Net vs Intel's Concurrent Collections
We present a programming methodology and runtime performance case study
comparing the declarative data flow coordination language S-Net with Intel's
Concurrent Collections (CnC). As a coordination language S-Net achieves a
near-complete separation of concerns between sequential software components
implemented in a separate algorithmic language and their parallel orchestration
in an asynchronous data flow streaming network. We investigate the merits of
S-Net and CnC with the help of a relevant and non-trivial linear algebra
problem: tiled Cholesky decomposition. We describe two alternative S-Net
implementations of tiled Cholesky factorization and compare them with two CnC
implementations, one with explicit performance tuning and one without, that
have previously been used to illustrate Intel CnC. Our experiments on a 48-core
machine demonstrate that S-Net manages to outperform CnC on this problem.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, accepted for PLC 2014 worksho
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