ASR: Abstraction Subspace Reduction for Exposing Atomicity Violation Bugs in Multithreaded Programs

Many two-phase based dynamic concurrency bug detectors predict suspicious instances of atomicity violation from one execution trace, and examine each such instance by scheduling a confirmation run. If the amount of suspicious instances predicted is large, confirming all these instances becomes a bur...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security pp. 272 - 281
Main Authors Shangru Wu, Chunbai Yang, Chan, W. K.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.08.2015
Subjects
atomicity violation
Benchmark testing
bug detection
Computer bugs
Concurrent computing
detection ratio
Detectors
failures
Instruction sets
Partitioning algorithms
Prediction algorithms
reduction ratio
reduction technique
vulnerability
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Summary:Many two-phase based dynamic concurrency bug detectors predict suspicious instances of atomicity violation from one execution trace, and examine each such instance by scheduling a confirmation run. If the amount of suspicious instances predicted is large, confirming all these instances becomes a burden. In this paper, we present the first controlled experiment that evaluates the efficiency, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of reduction on suspicious instances in the detection of atomicity violations. A novel form of reduction technique named ASR is proposed. Our empirical analysis reveals many interesting findings: First, the reduced sets of instances produced by ASR significantly improve the efficiency of atomicity violation detection without significantly compromising the effectiveness. Second, ASR is significantly more cost-effective than random reduction and untreated reduction by 8.5 folds and 60.7 folds, respectively, in terms of mean normalized bug detection ratio. Third, six ASR techniques can be significantly more cost-effective than the technique modeled after a state-of-the-art detector.
DOI:10.1109/QRS.2015.46