1,971 papers · page 68 of 99
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…
While the memory of most machines is organized as a hierarchy, program data are laid out in a uniform address space. This paper defines a model of reference affinity, which measures how close a group of data are accessed together in a reference trace. It proves that the model giv…
Pointer analysis is a critical problem in optimizing compiler, parallelizing compiler, software engineering and most recently, hardware synthesis. While recent efforts have suggested symbolic method, which uses Bryant's Binary Decision Diagram as an alternative to capture the poi…
Modern network processors employ multi-threading to allow concurrency amongst multiple packet processing tasks. We studied the properties of applications running on the network processors and observed that their imbalanced register requirements across different threads at differe…
In prior work [15] we studied a language construct restrict that allows programmers to specify that certain pointers are not aliased to other pointers used within a lexical scope. Among other applications, programming with these constructs helps program analysis tools locally rec…
Program verification tools (such as model checkers and static analyzers) can find many errors in programs. These tools need formal specifications of correct program behavior, but writing a correct specification is difficult, just as writing a correct program is difficult. Thus, j…
This paper reports on a new approach to solving a subset-based points-to analysis for Java using Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). In the model checking community, BDDs have been shown very effective for representing large sets and solving very large verification problems. Our wor…
We show that abstract interpretation-based static program analysis can be made efficient and precise enough to formally verify a class of properties for a family of large programs with few or no false alarms. This is achieved by refinement of a general purpose static analyzer and…
The Real Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) allows a program to create real-time threads with hard real-time constraints. Real-time threads use region-based memory management to avoid unbounded pauses caused by interference from the garbage collector. The RTSJ uses runtime checks…
Typed assembly languages provide a way to generate machine-checkable safety proofs for machine-language programs. But the soundness proofs of most existing typed assembly languages are hand-written and cannot be machine-checked, which is worrisome for such large calculi. We have …
Clustered architectures are a solution to the bottleneck of centralized register files in superscalar and VLIW processors. The main challenge associated with clustered architectures is compiler support to effectively partition operations across the available resources on each clu…
CCured is a program transformation system that adds memory safety guarantees to C programs by verifying statically that memory errors cannot occur and by inserting run-time checks where static verification is insufficient.This paper addresses major usability issues in a previous …
Profiling can accurately analyze program behavior for select data inputs. We show that profiling can also predict program locality for inputs other than profiled ones. Here locality is defined by the distance of data reuse. Studying whole-program data reuse may reveal global patt…
Interpreters designed for efficiency execute a huge number of indirect branches and can spend more than half of the execution time in indirect branch mispredictions. Branch target buffers are the best widely available form of indirect branch prediction; however, their prediction …