863861 - Event - (2013-04-23 11:00 UTC-4) - Ten Forward - Effective Race Detection for Event-Driven Programs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Air Mozilla :: Events, task)

Description

[Azita]

Topic: Effective Race Detection for Event-Driven Programs
Presenter: Manu Sridharan
Date: 2013-04-23
Time: 11:00 UTC-4
Duration: 1 Hour
Privacy: The Public
Large Screen Location: MTV, 
Description: 
Abstract: Like shared-memory multi-threaded programs, event-driven programs are susceptible to data races that are hard to reproduce and debug.  However, the pervasive use of ad hoc synchronization in such programs can lead a dynamic race detector to report too many false positives.  Race detection for such programs also faces a scalability challenge, as a large number of short-running event handlers can overwhelm standard vector-clock-based techniques.

We present a novel race detector EventRacer that addresses both of these challenges.  We introduce race coverage, a systematic method for exposing ad hoc synchronization and other key races to the user, significantly reducing false positives. We also present an efficient connectivity algorithm that uses chain covers to dramatically decrease the overhead of vector clocks.  We show that for client-side web applications, our techniques lead to large performance and precision improvements over state-of-the-art techniques.
Special Requirements: