CHESS is a tool for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs in concurrent programs. CHESS repeatedly runs a concurrent test ensuring that every run takes a different interleaving. If an interleaving results in an error, CHESS can reproduce the interleaving for improved debugging. CHESS is available for both managed and native programs.
CHESS Release on DevLabs!
New downloads of CHESS are available, both for commercial and academic use, on DevLabs. This includes an integration of CHESS with Visual Studio 2008 and support for managed code. For more information see the CHESS blog, documentation, FAQ, and forum.
News
- New! CHESS players list
- New! CHESS release with data race detection (Release notes)
- New! CHESS Tutorial at PLDI 2009 [slides: ppt, pdf]
- Getting Started with CHESS in Visual Studio (example source code)
- Channel 9 video on CHESS
- Read the Dr. Dobb's Journal article on CHESS, listen to Scott Hanselman's interview about CHESS at PDC (go to 28:10), watch the video of the CHESS PDC presentation
- Mary Jo Foley: Non-Microsoft developers to get a peek at CHESS concurrency test tool
- MSDN article on Tools and Techniques to Identify Concurrency Issues
Publications
- T. Ball, S. Burckhardt, K. Coons, M. Musuvathi, S. Qadeer, Preemption Sealing for Efficient Concurrency Testing, Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2009-143 (under submission)
- M. Musuvathi, S. Qadeer, T. Ball, G. Basler, P. A. Nainar, I. Neamtiu. Finding and Reproducing Heisenbugs in Concurrent Programs.In Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2008.
- S. Burchkardt and M. Musuvathi Effective Program Verification for Relaxed Memory Models. In 20th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV), 2008.
- M. Musuvathi and S. Qadeer. Fair Stateless Model Checking. In ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2008.
- M. Musuvathi and S. Qadeer. Iterative Context Bounding for Systematic Testing of Multithreaded Programs. In PLDI 2007.
- T. Ball, S. Burchkardt, M. Musuvathi, and S.Qadeer. First-class Concurrency Debugging and Testing. Position Paper, Workshop on Exploiting Concurrency Efficiently and Correctly, 2008.
- M. Musuvathi, S. Qadeer, and T. Ball. CHESS: A Systematic Testing Tool for Concurrent Software. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2007-149, 2007.
CHESS Players
A number of people are experimenting with CHESS in course projects. The links below point to their project summaries. Thanks to these CHESS players for their work! Let us known if you have something to contribute!
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Michael Bentley, Univ. Utah
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Carson Jones, Univ. Utah
Interns
- 2008
- Katherine Coons, University of Texas at Austin
- Alexander Malkis, Freiburg University
- Vasu Singh, EPFL
- 2007
- Gerard Basler, ETH Zurich
- Tayfun Elmas, Koc University
- Piramanayagam Arumuga Nainar, University of Wisconsin at Madison
- 2006
- Iulian Neamtiu, University of Maryland at College Park
