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BIFER: a biphasic trace filter approach to scalable prediction of concurrency errors

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Abstract

Predictive trace analysis (PTA), a static trace analysis technique for concurrent programs, can offer powerful capability support for finding concurrency errors unseen in a previous program execution. Existing PTA techniques always face considerable challenges in scaling to large traces which contain numerous critical events. One main reason is that an analyzed trace includes not only redundant memory accessing events and threads that cannot contribute to discovering any additional errors different from the found candidate ones, but also many residual synchronization events which still affect PTA to check whether these candidate ones are feasible or not even after removing the redundant events. Removing them from the trace can significantly improve the scalability of PTA without affecting the quality of the PTA results. In this paper, we propose a biphasic trace filter approach, BIFER in short, to filter these redundant events and residual events for improving the scalability of PTA to expose general concurrency errors. In addition, we design a model which indicates the lock history and the happens-before history of each thread with two kinds of ways to achieve the efficient filtering. We implement a prototypical tool BIFER for Java programs on the basis of a predictive trace analysis framework. Experiments show that BIFER can improve the scalability of PTA during the process of analyzing all of the traces.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Xi Chang & Jianjun Zhao

  2. Department of Software Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Zhuo Zhang & Peng Zhang

  3. Department of Software Engineering, Shanghai Second Polytechnic University, Shanghai, 201209, China

    Jianxin Xue

Authors
  1. Xi Chang
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  2. Zhuo Zhang
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  3. Peng Zhang
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  4. Jianxin Xue
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  5. Jianjun Zhao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xi Chang.

Additional information

Xi Chang received her BS in computer science and technology in 2000 and her MS in software engineering in 2006 from National University of Defense Technology, China. She is currently a PhD candidate in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Her research interests include program analysis and testing for concurrent program.

Zhuo Zhang received his BS in computer science and technology in 2007 from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China. He is currently a master in computer science and technology at School of Computer, NUDT. His research interest includes software debugging and program slicing.

Peng Zhang is currently a master in computer science and technology at School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, China. His research interest includes software debugging and maintenance.

Jianxin Xue received his MS in software engineering from National University of Defense Technology, China in 2006, and his PhD in computer software and theory from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2013. Jianxin Xue has been an assistant professor in Department of Software engineering, Shanghai Second Polytechnic University, China. His primary research interest is concurrency theory and analysis of concurrent program.

Jianjun Zhao received his BE in computer science from Tsinghua University, China in 1987, and his PhD in computer science from Kyushu University, Japan in 1997. He was an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Japan from 1997 to 2000, and an associate professor from 2000 to 2005. He also worked as a visiting scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2002 to 2003. Since 2005, he has been a full professor at the School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. His primary research interest is program analysis, software testing, model checking, and formal specification and verification techniques.

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Chang, X., Zhang, Z., Zhang, P. et al. BIFER: a biphasic trace filter approach to scalable prediction of concurrency errors. Front. Comput. Sci. 9, 944–955 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4334-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4334-4

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