Using Architecture Support to make Concurrent and Parallel Software Less Buggy and More Reliable

The limits of single-thread performance and the demands of emerging
applications have caused a shift toward increasingly concurrent and parallel
software. For example, concurrency and parallelism unlock the performance and
energy benefits of multi-core architectures and many domains like servers,
mobile devices, and cloud applications require concurrency. Unfortunately,
writing correct, reliable concurrent software is extremely difficult. In this
talk, I will discuss my research on using architecture and system support to
make programs easier to debug and less prone to failure.

First, I will present Recon, a new technique for concurrency debugging. Using
a simple statistical model, Recon isolates and reconstructs the root cause of
failures to help programmers understand their errors. With hardware support,
Recon works efficiently even in production. In experiments with real, buggy
programs (e.g., MySQL, Apache) we showed Recon reveals bug root causes
with few — often 0 — false positives.

Second, I will present Aviso, a new technique for avoiding failures in buggy
concurrent programs. Aviso traces events as programs run. When an
execution fails, Aviso uses the failing event trace and a statistical model to
generate thread schedule constraints that prevent the same failure from
occurring in the future. Collections of systems running Aviso can work
cooperatively to find and share effective constraints. Our experiments with
real software show that Aviso decreases failure rates by up to two orders of
magnitude with performance overheads tolerable for production use.
Brandon Lucia is a 6th (and final) year PhD student at the University of
Washington. Brandon's research focuses on designing new computer
architectures and systems that address the challenges of concurrency
and parallelism. His thesis work developed architecture and system
support for new programming and execution models, new debugging
techniques, and new failure avoidance mechanisms for concurrent
software. Brandon's work crosses the boundaries of traditional
architecture, including not just hardware, but compilers, system
software layers, and even application-level support, like statistical
models. Brandon won the 2010 IBM PhD fellowship for his work in this
area. Throughout his graduate career, Brandon has worked with his
advisor, Luis Ceze, and many other wonderful collaborators from
academia and industrial research labs, such as MSR and HP Labs.
Brandon lives in Seattle with his cat. More information can be found
at http://brandonlucia.com.