PhD Thesis Defense - Zunchen Huang

PhD Thesis Defense - Zunchen Huang

Committee Members: Chao Wang (chair), Srivatsan Ravi, and Pierluigi Nuzzo

Title: Constraint Based Analysis for Persistent Memory Programs

Abstract: Emerging persistent memory technologies are beginning to bridge the gap between volatile memory and nonvolatile storage in computer systems, by allowing high speed memory access, byte addressability, and persistency at the same time. However, PM programming remains a challenging and error prone task due to reliance on ordinary developers to write correct and efficient PM software code. In this dissertation, I propose a framework to detect and repair PM bugs automatically using a set of new symbolic analysis techniques. Unlike existing techniques that rely on patterns and heuristics to detect and repair a small subset of PM bugs, the proposed techniques can handle a wide range of PM bugs. This is achieved by first encoding the program semantics, correctness properties, and PM requirements as a set of logical constraints, and then solving these constraints using off the shelf SMT solvers. By reasoning about these logical constraints symbolically, the proposed techniques can detect, diagnose, and repair PM bugs efficiently. Furthermore, I propose a new method to automatically infer PM requirements using a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques. Finally, I demonstrate the feasibility of applying the proposed techniques to programs that rely on both PM and multi threading, by reasoning about persistency and concurrency simultaneously.

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Melissa Ochoa

Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/4326990557