[pl-seminar] ASE Practice Talk -- Nov. 8 (Friday) @ 3pm in 5331

[Peter Ohmann <ohmann@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I will be giving a practice talk for ASE this Friday, Nov. 8, at 3pm in CS 5331.  If you are able to attend, I would very much value your feedback.  See the abstract below.

The talk will last approximately 20 minutes with questions following.

Thank you,

Peter

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Title: Lightweight Control-Flow Instrumentation and Postmortem Analysis in Support of Debugging
Time: Friday Nov. 8 @ 3pm
Location: CS5331

      Debugging is difficult and costly.  As a human programmer looks

      for a bug, it would be helpful to see a complete trace of events

      leading to the point of failure.  Unfortunately, full tracing is

      simply too slow to use in deployment, and may even be

      impractical during testing.

    

      We aid post-deployment debugging by giving programmers

      additional information about program activity shortly before

      failure.  We use latent information in post-failure memory

      dumps, augmented by low-overhead, tunable run-time tracing.  Our

      results with a realistically-tuned tracing scheme show low

      enough overhead (0–5%) to be used in production runs.  We

      demonstrate several potential uses of this enhanced information,

      including a novel postmortem static slice restriction technique

      and a reduced view of potentially-executed code.  Experimental

      evaluation shows our approach to be very effective, such as

      shrinking interprocedural slices by 49–78% in larger

      applications.