Dynamic datarace detection for object-oriented programs

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-66).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Multithreaded shared-memory programs are susceptible to dataraces, bugs that may exhibit themselves only in rare circumstances and can have detrimental effects on program behavior. Dataraces are often difficult to debug because they are difficult to reproduce and can affect program behavior in subtle ways, so tools which aid in detecting and preventing dataraces can be invaluable. Past dynamic datarace detection tools either incurred large overhead, ranging from 3x to 30x, or sacrificed precision in reducing overhead, reporting many false errors. This thesis presents a novel approach to efficient and precise datarace detection for multithreaded object-oriented programs. Our runtime datarace detector incurs an overhead ranging from 13% to 42% for our test suite, well below the overheads reported in previous work. Furthermore, our precise approach reveals dangerous dataraces in real programs with few spurious warnings.by Manu Sridharan.M.Eng