Thurs. Feb 10, 2011 - UPCRC Research Seminar - AtomTracker: A Comprehensive Approach to Atomic Region Inference and Violation Detection

[Kathy_F_Intel]

This presentation is OPEN to the public.

http://www.upcrc.illinois.edu/seminars.html

UPCRC Research Seminar

AtomTracker: A Comprehensive Approach to Atomic Region Inference and Violation Detection

by Abdullah Muzahid, Illinois Computer Science

Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 2 PM (Central Time)

2405 Siebel Center for Computer Science

Live Stream: http://media.cs.illinois.edu/live/UPCRClive.asx

Live Chat: http://www.upcrc.illinois.edu/chat/ <>

Will be activated at day/time of seminar.

Abstract: A particularly insidious type of concurrency bug is atomicity violations. While there has been substantial work on automatic detection of atomicity violations, each existing technique has focused on a certain type of atomic region. To address this limitation, this paper presents Atom Tracker, a comprehensive approach to atomic region inference and violation detection. Atom Tracker is the first scheme to (1) automatically infer generic atomic regions (not limited by issues such as the number of variables accessed, the number of instructions included, or the type of code construct the region is embedded in) and (2) automatically detect violations of them at runtime with negligible execution overhead. Atom Tracker provides novel algorithms to infer generic atomic regions and to detect atomicity violations of them. Moreover, we present a hardware implementation of the violation detection algorithm that leverages cache coherence state transitions in a multiprocessor. In our evaluation, we take eight atomicity violation bugs from real-world codes like Apache, MySql, and Mozilla, and show that Atom Tracker detects them all. In addition, Atom Tracker automatically infers all of the atomic regions in a set of micro benchmarks accurately. Finally, we also show that the hardware implementation induces a negligible execution time overhead of 0.24.0% and, therefore, enables Atom Tracker to find atomicity violations on-the-fly in production runs.

Bio: Abdullah Muzahid is a PhD student in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works with Prof. Josep Torrellas. His research lies within the fields of parallel programming and debugging. He is particularly interested in hardware support to debug concurrency bugs like data race, atomicity violation etc. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology, and his master's degree in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This particular work has been published in MICRO, 2010.

This presentation is OPEN to the public.