Producing Scheduling that Causes Concurrent Programs to Fail

Ben-Asher, Yosi; Eytani, Yaniv; Farchi, Eitan; Ur, Shmuel

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/11158 Copy

Description

Title

Producing Scheduling that Causes Concurrent Programs to Fail

Author(s)

• Ben-Asher, Yosi
• Eytani, Yaniv
• Farchi, Eitan
• Ur, Shmuel

Issue Date

2006-02

Keyword(s)

computer science

Abstract

A noise maker is a tool that seeds a concurrent program with conditional synchronization primitives (such as yield()) for the purpose of increasing the likelihood that a bug manifest itself. This work explores the theory and practice of choosing where in the program to induce such thread switches at runtime. We introduce a novel fault model that classifies locations as .good., .neutral., or .bad,. based on the effect of a thread switch at the location. Using the model we explore the terms in which efficient search for real-life concurrent bugs can be carried out. We accordingly justify the use of probabilistic algorithms for this search and gain a deeper insight of the work done so far on noise-making. We validate our approach by experimenting with a set of programs taken from publicly available multi-threaded benchmark. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that real-life behavior is similar to what our model predicts.

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/11158

Copyright and License Information

You are granted permission for the non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, BUT this permission is only for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).

Owning Collections