"... Abstract Concurrency bugs are among the most difficult to test and diagnoseof all software bugs. The multicore technology trend worsens this ..."
"... Abstract—This paper presents and characterizes Rodinia, a benchmark suite for heterogeneous computing. To help architects study emerging platforms such as GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), Rodinia includes applications and kernels which target multi-core CPU and GPU platforms. The choice of applicat ..."
Abstract—This paper presents and characterizes Rodinia, a benchmark suite for heterogeneous computing. To help architects study emerging platforms such as GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), Rodinia includes applications and kernels which target multi-core CPU and GPU platforms. The choice of applications is inspired by Berkeley's dwarf taxonomy. Our characterization shows that the Rodinia benchmarks cover a wide range of parallel communication patterns, synchronization techniques and power consumption, and has led to some important architectural insight, such as the growing importance of memory-bandwidth limitations and the consequent importance of data layout. I.
"... Significant time is spent by companies trying to reproduce and fix the bugs that occur for released code. To assist developers, we propose the BugNet architecture to continuously record information on production runs. The information collected before the crash of a program can be used by the develop ..."
"... This paper introduces McPAT, an integrated power, area, and timing modeling framework that supports comprehensive design space exploration for multicore and manycore processor configurations ranging from 90nm to 22nm and beyond. At the microarchitectural level, McPAT includes models for the fundamen ..."
This paper introduces McPAT, an integrated power, area, and timing modeling framework that supports comprehensive design space exploration for multicore and manycore processor configurations ranging from 90nm to 22nm and beyond. At the microarchitectural level, McPAT includes models for the fundamental components of a chip multiprocessor, including in-order and out-of-order processor cores, networks-on-chip, shared caches, integrated memory controllers, and multiple-domain clocking. At the circuit and technology levels, McPAT supports critical-path timing modeling, area modeling, and dynamic, short-circuit, and leakage power modeling for each of the device types forecast in the ITRS roadmap including bulk CMOS, SOI, and doublegate transistors.
"... Dynamic taint analysis is gaining momentum. Techniques based on dynamic tainting have been successfully used in the context of application security, and now their use is also being explored in different areas, such as program understanding, software testing, and debugging. Unfortunately, most existi ..."
Dynamic taint analysis is gaining momentum. Techniques based on dynamic tainting have been successfully used in the context of application security, and now their use is also being explored in different areas, such as program understanding, software testing, and debugging. Unfortunately, most existing approaches for dynamic tainting are defined in an ad-hoc manner, which makes it difficult to extend them, experiment with them, and adapt them to new contexts. Moreover, most existing approaches are focused on data-flow based tainting only and do not consider tainting due to control flow, which limits their applicability outside the security domain. To address these limitations and foster experimentation with dynamic tainting techniques, we defined and developed a general framework for dynamic tainting that (1) is highly flexible and customizable, (2) allows for performing both data-flow and control-flow based tainting conservatively, and (3) does not rely on any customized runtime system. We also present DYTAN, an implementation of our framework that works on x86 executables, and a set of preliminary studies that show how DYTAN can be used to implement different tainting-based approaches with limited effort. In the studies, we also show that DYTAN can be used on real software, by using FIRE-FOX as one of our subjects, and illustrate how the specific characteristics of the tainting approach used can affect efficiency and accuracy of the taint analysis, which further justifies the use of our framework to experiment with different variants of an approach.
"... Abstract. In this paper, we give an overview of the BitBlaze project, a new approach to computer security via binary analysis. In particular, BitBlaze focuses on building a unified binary analysis platform and using it to provide novel solutions to a broad spectrum of different security problems. Th ..."
Abstract. In this paper, we give an overview of the BitBlaze project, a new approach to computer security via binary analysis. In particular, BitBlaze focuses on building a unified binary analysis platform and using it to provide novel solutions to a broad spectrum of different security problems. The binary analysis platform is designed to enable accurate analysis, provide an extensible architecture, and combines static and dynamic analysis as well as program verification techniques to satisfy the common needs of security applications. By extracting security-related properties from binary programs directly, BitBlaze enables a principled, root-cause based approach to computer security, offering novel and effective solutions, as demonstrated with over a dozen different security applications.
"... Current shared memory multicore and multiprocessor systems are nondeterministic. Each time these systems execute a multithreaded application, even if supplied with the same input, they can produce a different output. This frustrates debugging and limits the ability to properly test multithreaded cod ..."
Current shared memory multicore and multiprocessor systems are nondeterministic. Each time these systems execute a multithreaded application, even if supplied with the same input, they can produce a different output. This frustrates debugging and limits the ability to properly test multithreaded code, becoming a major stumbling block to the much-needed widespread adoption of parallel programming. In this paper we make the case for fully deterministic shared memory multiprocessing (DMP). The behavior of an arbitrary multithreaded program on a DMP system is only a function of its inputs. The core idea is to make inter-thread communication fully deterministic. Previous approaches to coping with nondeterminism in multithreaded programs have focused on replay, a technique useful only for debugging. In contrast, while DMP systems are directly useful for debugging by offering repeatability by default, we argue that parallel programs should execute deterministically in the field as well. This has the potential to make testing more assuring and increase the reliability of deployed multithreaded software. We propose a range of approaches to enforcing determinism and discuss their implementation trade-offs. We show that determinism can be provided with little performance cost using our architecture proposals on future hardware, and that software-only approaches can be utilized on existing systems.