Abstract
One of the major difficulties in debugging concurrent programs is that the programmer usually experiences frequent thread context switches, which perplexes the reasoning process. This problem can be alleviated by trace simplification techniques, which produce the same computation process but with much fewer number of context switches. The state of the art trace simplification technique takes a dynamic approach and does not scale well to large traces, hampering its practicality. We present a static trace simplification approach, SimTrace, that dramatically improves the efficiency of trace simplification through reasoning about the computation equivalence of traces offline. By constructing a dependence graph model of events, our trace simplification algorithm scales linearly to the trace size and quadratic to the number of nodes in the dependence graph. Underpinned by a trace equivalence theorem, we guarantee that the results generated by SimTrace are sound and no dynamic program re-execution is required to validate the trace equivalence. Our experiments show that SimTrace scales well to traces with more than 1M events, making it attractive to practical use.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Mazurkiewicz, A.: Trace theory. In: Rozenberg, G. (ed.) APN 1987. LNCS, vol. 266, Springer, Heidelberg (1987)
Ball, T., Naik, M., Rajamani, S.K.: From symptom to cause: localizing errors in counterexample traces. In: POPL (2003)
Chen, F., Roşu, G.: Parametric and sliced causality. In: Damm, W., Hermanns, H. (eds.) CAV 2007. LNCS, vol. 4590, pp. 240–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Choi, J.-D., Zeller, A.: Isolating failure-inducing thread schedules. In: ISSTA (2002)
Curtis, R., Wittie, L.D.: Bugnet: A debugging system for parallel programming environments. In: ICDCS (1982)
Diekert, V., Rozenberg, G.: The book of traces (1995)
Farzan, A., Madhusudan, P., Sorrentino, F.: Meta-analysis for Atomicity Violations under Nested Locking. In: Bouajjani, A., Maler, O. (eds.) CAV 2009. LNCS, vol. 5643, pp. 248–262. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Flanagan, C., Freund, S.N.: Atomizer: a dynamic atomicity checker for multithreaded programs. In: POPL (2004)
Fonseca, P., Li, C., Singhal, V., Rodrigues, R.: A study of the internal and external effects of concurrency bugs. In: DSN (2010)
Groce, A., Chaki, S., Kroening, D., Strichman, O.: Error explanation with distance metrics. Int. J. Softw. Tools Technol. Transf. (2006)
Groce, A., Visser, W.: What went wrong: Explaining counterexamples. In: Ball, T., Rajamani, S.K. (eds.) SPIN 2003. LNCS, vol. 2648, pp. 121–135. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Hower, D.R., Hill, M.D.: Rerun: Exploiting episodes for lightweight memory race recording. In: ISCA (2008)
Huang, J., Liu, P., Zhang, C.: LEAP: Lightweight deterministic multi-processor replay of concurrent Java programs. In: Hong, S., Iwata, T. (eds.) FSE 2010. LNCS, vol. 6147, Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Jalbert, N., Sen, K.: A trace simplification technique for effective debugging of concurrent programs. In: FSE (2010)
Lamport, L.: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. CACM (1978)
Montesinos, P., Ceze, L., Torrellas, J.: Delorean: Recording and deterministically replaying shared-memory multi-processor execution efficiently. In: ISCA (2008)
Musuvathi, M., Qadeer, S., Ball, T., Basler, G., Nainar, P.A., Neamtiu, I.: Finding and reproducing heisenbugs in concurrent programs. In: OSDI (2008)
O’Callahan, R., Choi, J.-D.: Hybrid dynamic data race detection. In: PPoPP (2003)
Olszewski, M., Ansel, J., Amarasinghe, S.: Kendo: efficient deterministic multithreading in software. In: ASPLOS (2009)
Park, S., Zhou, Y., Xiong, W., Yin, Z., Kaushik, R., Lee, K.H., Lu, S.: PRES: probabilistic replay with execution sketching on multi-processors. In: SOSP (2009)
Şerbănuţă, T.F., Chen, F., Roşu, G.: Maximal causal models for sequentially consistent multithreaded systems. Technical report, University of Illinois (2010)
Sinha, N., Wang, C.: Staged concurrent program analysis. In: FSE (2010)
Tallam, S., Tian, C., Gupta, R., Zhang, X.: Enabling tracing of long-running multithreaded programs via dynamic execution reduction. In: ISSTA (2007)
Vineet, K., Chao, W.: Universal causality graphs: A precise happens-before model for detecting bugs in concurrent programs. In: Touili, T., Cook, B., Jackson, P. (eds.) CAV 2010. LNCS, vol. 6174, pp. 434–449. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Wang, C., Chaudhuri, S., Gupta, A., Yang, Y.: Symbolic pruning of concurrent program executions. In: ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE (2009)
Wang, C., Limaye, R., Ganai, M., Gupta, A.: Trace-based symbolic analysis for atomicity violations. In: Esparza, J., Majumdar, R. (eds.) TACAS 2010. LNCS, vol. 6015, pp. 328–342. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Wang, H., He, H., Yang, J., Yu, P.S., Yu, J.X.: Dual labeling: Answering graph reachability queries in constant time. In: ICDE (2006)
Zeller, A., Hildebrandt, R.: Simplifying and isolating failure-inducing input. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Huang, J., Zhang, C. (2011). An Efficient Static Trace Simplification Technique for Debugging Concurrent Programs. In: Yahav, E. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6887. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23702-7_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23702-7_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23701-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23702-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)