Scalable Dynamic Analysis for Automated Fault Location

Techniques for generation, storage, and analysis of execution traces are critical to addressing many complex problems. For example, execution traces can be analyzed to drive automated techniques for locating faults and detecting security vulnerabilities. However, the memory needed to maintain comprehensive trace information (including control flow, value, address, and dependence profiles) can be very large and the time needed to perform dynamic analysis on the traces can be long.

In this talk I will describe a framework for tracing that achieves its scalability via checkpointing/logging based demand-driven collection of relevant traces and a highly compacted representation of the collected traces. Using this framweork we have developed a practical dynamic slicing algorithm. I will also show how we have used dynamic slicing to assist in fault location during debugging by effectively narrowing the fault to a small part of the code.

Speaker Details

Rajiv Gupta is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Arizona. His areas of research interest include Program Analysis; Compiler and Architectural Support for Optimization of Performance, Power and Memory in Embedded Systems; and Software Tools for Profiling, Slicing, and Debugging. Rajiv has published over 190 articles in refereed conferences and journals, he holds 8 US patents, and has supervised 15 PhD dissertations. Papers coauthored by him have been selected for: inclusion in 20 Years of PLDI (1979-1999), distinguished paper award in ICSE 2003, most original paper award in ICPP 2003, and outstanding paper award in ICECCS 1996.Rajiv is a member of the Technical Advisory Group on Networking and Information Technology of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He received the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991. He served as the Program Chair for PLDI’03, HPCA’03, and LCTES’05 conferences and Co-General Chair for CGO’05 conference. He has also been appointed as the General Chair of PLDI’08 conference and Program Co-Chair of HiPEAC’08 conference. He serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization and a number of other journals.

Date:
Speakers:
Rajiv Gupta
Affiliation:
The University of Arizona
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