[madPL] Akash Lal visit to madPL

[Thomas Reps <reps@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

 

Akash Lal, from MSR-India and a UW CS 2009 Ph.D., will be visiting virtually on Friday, January 28.  He will give a talk at 9 AM (Zoom link: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/96844120582?pwd=NFBEWUgwVldEbWJNYjBYSGRUU29mQT09); see below for the talk details.

Akash said that he would be happy to talk to people through 1:30 PM CT.  Here is the link to a sign-up sheet to talk with Akash: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cOVqiD18raj4JPRhKzA5nGvbq2d-IIp4D_CawNUItBk/edit#gid=0.  (Students/faculty who are doing related things: feel free to sign up for 2-on-1.)

Tom

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Title: Learning-based Concurrency Testing

Abstract: Concurrency bugs are notoriously hard to detect and reproduce. Controlled concurrency testing (CCT) techniques aim to offer a solution, where a scheduler explores the space of possible interleavings of a concurrent program looking for bugs. Since the set of possible interleavings is typically very large, these schedulers employ heuristics that prioritize the search to âinterestingâ subspaces. However, current heuristics are typically tuned to specific bug patterns, which limits their effectiveness in practice.

In this talk, I will describe QL, a learning-based CCT framework where the likelihood of an action being selected by the scheduler is influenced by earlier explorations. We leverage the classical Q-learning algorithm to explore the space of possible interleavings, allowing the exploration to adapt to the program under test, unlike previous techniques. We have implemented and evaluated QL on a set of microbenchmarks, complex protocols, as well as production cloud services. In our experiments, we found QL to consistently outperform the state-of-the-art in CCT.

Bio: Akash Lal is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Bangalore. He works broadly in the area of programming languages. His interests are in language design, compiler implementation and program analysis targeted towards helping developers deal with the complexity of modern software. At Microsoft, Akash has worked on the verification engine behind Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier tool that has won multiple best-paper awards at top conferences. More recently, he has been working on project Coyote for building highly-reliable asynchronous systems. Akash completed his PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison and jointly received the ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis.