PS Seminar: Steven Freund (12/15)

From: George Necula (necula@eecs.berkeley.edu)
Date: 12/05/03


Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 21:00:50 -0800
From: George Necula <necula@eecs.berkeley.edu>
Subject: PS Seminar: Steven Freund (12/15)
Message-id: <4E06A937DADC3842ACE4D3A1096A9EACB5934A@janus.EECS.Berkeley.EDU>


 I just wanted to give you a heads up for the PS seminar on 12/15 (one week
from Monday, 310 Soda, at 4pm): 

 Atomizer: A Dynamic Atomicity Checker For Multithreaded Programs

Stephen Freund
Williams College

Ensuring the correctness of multithreaded programs is difficult, due to the
potential for unexpected interactions between concurrent threads. 
Much previous work has focused on detecting race conditions, but the absence

Of race conditions does not by itself prevent undesired thread 
interactions. We focus on the more fundamental non-interference property of 
atomicity; a method is atomic if its execution is not affected by and does
not interfere with concurrently-executing threads. Atomic methods can be
understood according to their sequential semantics, which significantly
simplifies reasoning about program correctness.

This talk presents a dynamic analysis for detecting atomicity 
violations. This analysis combines ideas from both Lipton's theory of
reduction and earlier dynamic race detectors. Experience with a prototype
checker for multithreaded Java code demonstrates that this approach is
effective for detecting errors due to unintended interactions between
threads. In particular, our atomicity checker detects errors that would be
missed by standard race detectors, and it produces fewer false alarms on
benign races that do not cause atomicity violations.

This is joint work with Cormac Flanagan (UC Santa Cruz).



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