Sound and precise analysis of parallel programs through schedule specialization

Parallel programs are known to be difficult to analyze. A key reason is that they typically have an enormous number of execution interleavings, or schedules. Static analysis over all schedules requires over-approximations, resulting in poor precision; dynamic analysis rarely covers more than a tiny fraction of all schedules. We propose an approach called schedule specialization to analyze a parallel program over only a small set of schedules for precision, and then enforce these schedules at runtime for soundness of the static analysis results. We build a schedule specialization framework for C/C++ multithreaded programs that use Pthreads. Our framework avoids the need to modify every analysis to be schedule-aware by specializing a program into a simpler program based on a schedule, so that the resultant program can be analyzed with stock analyses for improved precision. Moreover, our framework provides a precise schedule-aware def-use analysis on memory locations, enabling us to bui...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Jingyue Wu, Yang Tang, Gang Hu, Heming Cui, Junfeng Yang
• Keywords: Multithreaded Programs, PLDI 2012, Precise Analyses, Programming Languages, Stock Analyses