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Transforming Threads into Actors: Learning Concurrency Structure from Execution Traces

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Principles of Modeling

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10760))

Abstract

The threads and shared memory model is still the most commonly used programming model. However, programs written using threads interacting with shared memory model are notoriously bug-prone and hard to comprehend. An important reason for this lack of comprehensibility is thread based programs obscure the natural structure of concurrency in a distributed world: actors executing autonomously with their own internal logic and interacting at arms length with each other. While actors encapsulate their internal state, enabling consistency invariants of the data structures to be maintained locally, thread-based programs use control-centric synchronization primitives (such as locks) that are divorced from the concurrency structure of a program. Making the concurrency structure explicit provides useful documentation for developers. Moreover, it may be useful for refactoring thread-based object-oriented programs into an actor-oriented programs based on message-passing and isolated state. We present a novel algorithm based on Bayesian inference that automatically infers the concurrency structure of programs from their traces. The concurrency structure is inferred as consistency invariants of program data, and expressed in terms of annotations on data fields and method parameters. We illustrate our algorithm on Java programs using type annotations in Java classes and suggest how such annotations may be useful.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Peter Dinges, Farah Hariri, and Darko Marinov. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants NSF CCF 14-38982 and NSF CCF 16-17401, and by AFOSR/AFRL Air Force Research Laboratory and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under agreement FA8750-11-2-0084 for the Assured Cloud Computing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Gul Agha & Karl Palmskog

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  1. Gul Agha
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Correspondence to Gul Agha .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Marten Lohstroh

  2. National Instruments, Berkeley, California, USA

    Patricia Derler

  3. Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden, Reykjavík University, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Marjan Sirjani

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Agha, G., Palmskog, K. (2018). Transforming Threads into Actors: Learning Concurrency Structure from Execution Traces. In: Lohstroh, M., Derler, P., Sirjani, M. (eds) Principles of Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10760. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95246-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95246-8_2

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