7,482 papers · page 253 of 375
Region-based memory management offers several important potential advantages over garbage collection, including real-time performance, better data locality, and more efficient use of limited memory. Researchers have advocated the use of regions for functional, imperative, and obj…
Software watermarking is a tool used to combat software piracy by embedding identifying information into a program. Most existing proposals for software watermarking have the shortcoming that the mark can be destroyed via fairly straightforward semantics-preserving code transform…
The emerging hardware support for thread-level speculation opens new opportunities to parallelize sequential programs beyond the traditional limits. By speculating that many data dependences are unlikely during runtime, consecutive iterations of a sequential loop can be executed …
When vectorizing for SIMD architectures that are commonly employed by today's multimedia extensions, one of the new challenges that arise is the handling of memory alignment. Prior research has focused primarily on vectorizing loops where all memory references are properly aligne…
When an individual task can be forcefully terminated at any time, cooperating tasks must communicate carefully. For example, if two tasks share an object, and if one task is terminated while it manipulates the object, the object may remain in an inconsistent or frozen state that …
Software model checking has been successful for sequential programs, where predicate abstraction offers suitable models, and counterexample-guided abstraction refinement permits the automatic inference of models. When checking concurrent programs, we need to abstract threads as w…
With billion-transistor chips on the horizon, single-chip multiprocessors (CMPs) are likely to become commodity components. Speculative CMPs use hardware to enforce dependence, allowing the compiler to improve performance by speculating on ambiguous dependences without absolute g…
Many program analyses can be reduced to graph reachability problems involving a limited form of context-free language reachability called Dyck-CFL reachability. We show a new reduction from Dyck-CFL reachability to set constraints that can be used in practice to solve these probl…
It has long been known that a fixed ordering of optimization phases will not produce the best code for every application. One approach for addressing this phase ordering problem is to use an evolutionary algorithm to search for a specific sequence of phases for each module or fun…
In this paper we present Jedd, a language extension to Java that supports a convenient way of programming with Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). The Jedd language abstracts BDDs as database-style relations and operations on relations, and provides static type rules to ensure that …
Regular path queries are a way of declaratively expressing queries on graphs as regular-expression-like patterns that are matched against paths in the graph. There are two kinds of queries: existential queries, which specify properties about individual paths, and universal querie…
Dynamic memory allocators (malloc/free) rely on mutual exclusion locks for protecting the consistency of their shared data structures under multithreading. The use of locking has many disadvantages with respect to performance, availability, robustness, and programming flexibility…
The design of concurrent programs is error-prone due to the interaction between concurrently executing threads. Traditional automated techniques for finding errors in concurrent programs, such as model checking, explore all possible thread interleavings. Since the number of threa…
Graph-coloring register allocation is an elegant and extremely popular optimization for modern machines. But as currently formulated, it does not handle two characteristics commonly found in commercial architectures. First, a single register name may appear in multiple register c…
Rapid exploration of the design space with simulation models is essential for quality hardware systems research and development. Despite striking commonalities across hardware systems, designers routinely fail to achieve high levels of reuse across models constructed in existing …
In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a static array-bound checker for a family of embedded programs: the flight control software of recent Mars missions. These codes are large (up to 280 KLOC), pointer intensive, heavily multithreaded and written in an objec…
Many programs can be invoked under different execution options, input parameters and data files. Such different execution contexts may lead to strikingly different execution instances. The optimal code generation may be sensitive to the execution instances. In this paper, we show…
This paper presents the first scalable context-sensitive, inclusion-based pointer alias analysis for Java programs. Our approach to context sensitivity is to create a clone of a method for every context of interest, and run a context-insensitive algorithm over the expanded call g…
In this paper, we show how separation (decomposing a verification problem into a collection of verification subproblems) can be used to improve the efficiency and precision of verification of safety properties. We present a simple language for specifying separation strategies for…
Although dynamic program slicing was first introduced to aid in user level debugging, applications aimed at improving software quality, reliability, security, and performance have since been identified as candidates for using dynamic slicing. However, the dynamic dependence graph…