9,570 research outputs found
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
Monitoring framework for stream-processing networks
Vu Thien Nga Nguyen, Raimund Kirner, and Frank Penczek, 'Monitoring framework for stream-processing networks'. Paper presented at the Workshop on Feedback-Directed Compiler Optimization for Multi-Core Architectures (FD-COMA 2012), Berlin, Germany. 21-23 January 2013.In this paper we present a monitoring framework that exploits special characteristics of stream-processing networks in order to reason the performance. The novelty of the framework is to trace the non-deterministic execution which is reflected in i) the dynamic mapping and scheduling of network components at the operating system level and ii) the dynamic message routing across the network at runtime. We evaluate the efficiency with an implementation for the coordination language S-Net, showing negligible overhead in most cases
COST Action IC 1402 ArVI: Runtime Verification Beyond Monitoring -- Activity Report of Working Group 1
This report presents the activities of the first working group of the COST
Action ArVI, Runtime Verification beyond Monitoring. The report aims to provide
an overview of some of the major core aspects involved in Runtime Verification.
Runtime Verification is the field of research dedicated to the analysis of
system executions. It is often seen as a discipline that studies how a system
run satisfies or violates correctness properties. The report exposes a taxonomy
of Runtime Verification (RV) presenting the terminology involved with the main
concepts of the field. The report also develops the concept of instrumentation,
the various ways to instrument systems, and the fundamental role of
instrumentation in designing an RV framework. We also discuss how RV interplays
with other verification techniques such as model-checking, deductive
verification, model learning, testing, and runtime assertion checking. Finally,
we propose challenges in monitoring quantitative and statistical data beyond
detecting property violation
GiViP: A Visual Profiler for Distributed Graph Processing Systems
Analyzing large-scale graphs provides valuable insights in different
application scenarios. While many graph processing systems working on top of
distributed infrastructures have been proposed to deal with big graphs, the
tasks of profiling and debugging their massive computations remain time
consuming and error-prone. This paper presents GiViP, a visual profiler for
distributed graph processing systems based on a Pregel-like computation model.
GiViP captures the huge amount of messages exchanged throughout a computation
and provides an interactive user interface for the visual analysis of the
collected data. We show how to take advantage of GiViP to detect anomalies
related to the computation and to the infrastructure, such as slow computing
units and anomalous message patterns.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Optical tomography using the SCIRun problem solving environment: Preliminary results for three-dimensional geometries and parallel processing
We present a 3D implementation of the UCL imaging package for absorption and scatter reconstruction from time-resolved data (TOAST), embedded in the SCIRun interactive simulation and visualization package developed at the University of Utah. SCIRun is a scientific programming environment that allows the interactive construction, debugging, and steering of large-scale scientific computations. While the capabilities of SCIRun's interactive approach are not yet fully exploited in the current TOAST implementation, an immediate benefit of the combined TOAST/SCIRun package is the availability of optimized parallel finite element forward solvers, and the use of SCIRun's existing 3D visualisation tools. A reconstruction of a segmented 3D head model is used as an example for demonstrating the capability of TOAST/SCIRun of simulating anatomically shaped meshes
PowerDrive: Accurate De-Obfuscation and Analysis of PowerShell Malware
PowerShell is nowadays a widely-used technology to administrate and manage
Windows-based operating systems. However, it is also extensively used by
malware vectors to execute payloads or drop additional malicious contents.
Similarly to other scripting languages used by malware, PowerShell attacks are
challenging to analyze due to the extensive use of multiple obfuscation layers,
which make the real malicious code hard to be unveiled. To the best of our
knowledge, a comprehensive solution for properly de-obfuscating such attacks is
currently missing. In this paper, we present PowerDrive, an open-source, static
and dynamic multi-stage de-obfuscator for PowerShell attacks. PowerDrive
instruments the PowerShell code to progressively de-obfuscate it by showing the
analyst the employed obfuscation steps. We used PowerDrive to successfully
analyze thousands of PowerShell attacks extracted from various malware vectors
and executables. The attained results show interesting patterns used by
attackers to devise their malicious scripts. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy of
behavioral models adopted by the analyzed codes and a comprehensive list of the
malicious domains contacted during the analysis
10181 Abstracts Collection -- Program Development for Extreme-Scale Computing
From May 2nd to May 7th, 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10181
``Program Development for Extreme-Scale Computing \u27\u27
was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics.
During the seminar, several participants presented their current
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of
the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of
seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper.
Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
- …