[os-reading] Practice talk for ASPLOS - Fri 3 pm

[Joy James Prabhu Arulraj <joy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

 Just a gentle reminder. The practice talk starts at 3 pm in room 1221.

Thanks,
Joy


> Hi all,
>
>  I will be giving a practice talk for ASPLOS on Friday at 3 pm in room 1221.
> It would be helpful to receive your questions and  feedback on the talk.
>
> Thanks,
> Joy
>
> ---
>
> Production-Run Software Failure Diagnosis via Hardware Performance Counters
>
> Event Date: Friday, March 8, 2013 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm
> Room: 1221
>
> This is a practice talk for ASPLOS 2013. The talk will be 20 minutes long
> with time for questions, feedback, and discussion after the talk.
>
> Sequential and concurrency bugs are widespread in deployed software. They
> cause severe failures and huge financial loss during production runs. Tools
> that diagnose production-run failures with low overhead are needed. The
> state-of-the-art diagnosis techniques use software instrumentation to sample
> program properties at run time and use off-line statistical analysis to
> identify properties most correlated with failures. Although promising, these
> techniques suffer from high run-time overhead, which is sometimes over 100%,
> for concurrency-bug failure diagnosis and hence are not suitable for
> production-run usage.
>
> We present PBI, a system that uses existing hardware performance counters to
> diagnose production-run failures caused by sequential and concurrency bugs
> with low overhead. PBI is designed based on several key observations. First,
> a few widely supported performance counter events can reflect a wide variety
> of common software bugs and can be monitored by hardware with almost no
> overhead. Second, the counter overflow interrupt supported by existing
> hardware and operating systems provides a natural and effective mechanism to
> conduct event sampling at user level. Third, the noise and non-determinism
> in interrupt delivery complements well with statistical processing.
>
> We evaluate PBI using 13 real-world concurrency and sequential bugs from
> representative open-source server, client, and utility programs, and 10 bugs
> from a widely used software-testing benchmark. Quantitatively, PBI can
> effectively diagnose failures caused by these bugs with a small overhead
> that is never higher than 10%. Qualitatively, PBI does not require any
> change to software and presents a novel use of existing hardware performance
> counters.