[Colloquium] Computer Science Seminar - March 7, 2014

[Sandra Wallace]

Shan Lu
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Date:  	Friday, March 7, 2014

Time:  	2:30 PM

Place: 	Ryerson 251
 
Title:	    “Diagnosing Production-Run Concurrency-Bug Failures”
 

Abstract: 
Failures caused by software bugs are widespread in production runs, causing severe losses for end users. Unfortunately, diagnosing production-run failures, especially failures caused by concurrency bugs in multi-threaded software, is challenging. Existing work cannot satisfy privacy, run-time overhead, diagnosis capability, and diagnosis latency requirements all at once.

This talk will present a series of attempts from my group to address the above challenges. Our first attempt, called CCI, uses carefully designed interleaving predicates and random sampling schemes to diagnose a wide variety of concurrency-bug failures with decent overhead. Our second attempt, called PBI, further improves the performance and preserves the diagnosis capability of CCI through a novel use of hardware performance counters. Our final attempt, called LXR, addresses the long diagnosis latency problem of CCI and PBI. Different from CCI and PBI that both obtain run time information through sampling, LXR obtains run-time information through hardware support that maintains recent execution history with negligible overhead. I will conclude the talk by discussing other research in my group that tackles concurrency bugs and performance bugs.

Bio:
Shan Lu is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin, Madison. She earned her Ph.D. at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2008. At University of Wisconsin, her group works on detecting, diagnosing, and fixing concurrency bugs and performance bugs. Shan Lu won the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2014, Distinguished Alumni Educator Award from Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois in 2013, and NSF Career Award in 2010. Her co-authored papers won the Best Paper Award at USENIX FAST in 2013, ACM-SIGPLAN CACM Research Highlight Nomination in 2011, and IEEE Micro Top Picks in 2006. She currently serves as the Information Director of ACM-SIGOPS.


Hosts:  Andrew Chien and John Reppy
 

*Refreshments will be served after the talk at 3:30 pm in Ryerson 255*
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