Abstract
Thread migration/checkpointing is becoming indispensable for load balancing and fault tolerance in high performance computing applications, and its success depends on the migration/checkpointing-safety, which concerns the construction of an accurate computation state. This safety is hard to guard in some languages, such as the C, whose type-unsafe features may cause the dynamic types associated with memory segments to be totally different from the static types declared in programs. To overcome this, we propose a novel intra-procedural, flow-insensitive, and context-insensitive pointer inference algorithm to systematically detect and recover unsafe factors. The proposed scheme conducts a thorough static analysis at compile time and inserts a minimized set of primitives to reduce the overhead of possible dynamic checks at run-time. Consequently, most unsafe features will be removed. Programmers can then code in any style, and nearly every program will be qualified for migration/checkpointing.
This research was supported in part by NSF IGERT grant 9987598, NSF MRI grant 9977815, and NSF ITR grant 0081696.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Milojicic, D., Douglis, F., Paindaveine, Y., Wheeler, R., Zhou, S.: Process Migration. ACM Computing Surveys 32(8), 241–299 (2000)
Rugina, R., Rinard, M.: Pointer Analysis for Multithreaded Programs. In: Proc. of the Conf. on Program Language Design and Implementation, pp. 77–90 (1999)
Smith, P., Hutchinson, N.: Heterogeneous process migration: the TUI system, Tech rep 96–04, University of British Columbia (1996)
Chanchio, K., Sun, X.: Data Collection and Restoration for Heterogeneous Process Migration. In: Proc. of Int’l Parallel and Dist. Processing Symp., pp. 51–51 (2001)
Jiang, H., Chaudhary, V.: Compile/Run-time Support for Thread Migration. In: Proc. of Int’l Parallel and Distributed Processing Symp., pp. 58–66 (2002)
Jiang, H., Chaudhary, V.: On Improving Thread Migration: Safety & Performance. In: Proc. of the Int’l Conf. on High Performance Computing, pp. 474–484 (2002)
Chandra, S., Reps, T.W.: Physical Type Checking for C. In: Proc. of Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering, pp. 66–75 (1999)
Yong, S.H., Horwitz, S., Reps, T.W.: Pointer Analysis for Programs with Structures and Casting. In: Proc. of the Conference on Programming Language Designand Implementation, pp. 91–103 (1999)
Steensgaard, B.: Points-to Analysis by Type Inference of Programs with Structures and Unions. In: Proc. of the Int’l Conf. on Compiler Construction, pp. 136–150 (1996)
Pointer-Intensive Benchmark Suite, Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, http://www.cs.wisc.edu/austin/ptr-dist.html
Andersen, L.O.: Program Analysis and Specialization for the C Programming Language. PhD thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen (1994)
Wilson, R.P., Lam, M.S.: Efficient Context-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for C Programs. In: Proc. of the Conf. on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pp. 1–12 (1995)
Necula, G.C., McPeak, S., Weimer, W.: CCured: type-safe retrofitting of legacy code. In: ACM Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages, pp. 128–139 (2002)
Jim, T., Morrisett, G., Grossman, D., Hicks, M., Cheney, J., Wang, Y.: Cyclone: A safe dialect of C. In: USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 275–288 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jiang, H., Chaudhary, V. (2003). Thread Migration/Checkpointing for Type-Unsafe C Programs. In: Pinkston, T.M., Prasanna, V.K. (eds) High Performance Computing - HiPC 2003. HiPC 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2913. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24596-4_50
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24596-4_50
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20626-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24596-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive