[pl-seminar] Talk today in 2310 @ 4 PM

[Nick Kidd <kidd@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

This is a reminder that there is a PL seminar today at 4:00 PM. The  
room has been changed to 2310.

Thanks,
-Nick

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----------------------------------
  A Serializability Violation Detector for Shared-Memory Server Programs

We aim to improve reliability of multithreaded programs by proposing a  
dynamic detector that seeks to detect erroneous program executions and  
their causes. We design and evaluate a Serializability Violation  
Detector (SVD) that has two goals: (1) triggering automatic recovery  
from erroneous executions using backward error recovery (BER), or  
simply alerting users that a software error has occurred; and (2)  
helping debug programs by revealing causes of error symptoms. Two  
properties of SVD help in achieving these goals. First, to detect  
erroneous executions, SVD checks serializability of atomic regions,  
which are code regions that need to be executed atomically. Second, to  
improve usability, SVD does not require a priori annotations of atomic  
regions; instead, SVD approximates them using a heuristic. Experimental  
results on three widely-used multithreaded server programs show that  
SVD finds real bugs and reports modest false positives.