CRII: SHF: SimDB: An Automated Framework to Debug System-level Concurrency Faults

CRII：SHF：SimDB：用于调试系统级并发故障的自动化框架

• 批准号: 1464032
• 负责人: Tingting Yu
• 金额: $ 17.46万
• 依托单位: University of Kentucky Research Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-01 至 2018-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1464032&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CRII; SHF; SimDB; Automated; Framework

Modern computer systems utilize multiple CPUs, connect to a large array of peripheral devices, and sense their surroundings through various sensors and actuators. The increasing complexity of these systems can cause software that runs on them to suffer from deployment failures due to various forms of concurrency faults. When a software failure occurs in the deployed system, developers need to debug the system and find the cause of the failure in a timely manner. Unfortunately, debugging large complex concurrent software systems is difficult. This is because concurrency faults occur ?intermittently? and are thus difficult to reproduce, unless there is a specific interleaving that can cause such faults to occur. For example, a failure may involve participation of various software components and system events; reproducing these may require recreating a combination of many factors or specific system environment settings (e.g., hardware,network). The goal of this project is to provide an automated framework that allows engineers to effectively debug system-level concurrency faults in deployed systems. To achieve this goal, the project will investigate and develop advanced static and dynamic analysis techniques. Specifically, it will (i) develop light-weight static analysis techniques that can identify potential failure-inducing program paths; (ii) develop dynamic analysis techniques by using virtualization to effectively reproduce failures that occur in the deployed systems due to nondeterministic and heterogeneous system events; (iii) implement an automated debugging framework that provides rich user interfaces to facilitate in-house debugging processes. The outcome of this project will be a framework that is scalable, transparent, and capable of dealing with broad classes of concurrency faults. The process by which the framework is employed is mostly automated so it requires little human intervention. As such, the framework is expected to help developers understand and correct failures in deployed systems, with benefits to all who depend on such systems.

现代计算机系统利用多个CPU，连接到大量的外围设备，并通过各种传感器和执行器感知周围环境。这些系统的复杂性日益增加会导致由于各种形式的并发故障而遭受部署故障的软件。当部署系统中发生软件故障时，开发人员需要调试系统并及时找到故障的原因。不幸的是，很难调试大型复杂并发软件系统。这是因为并发故障发生？间歇性吗？因此，除非有特定的交织可能会导致这种故障发生，否则很难繁殖。例如，故障可能涉及各种软件组件和系统事件的参与；再现这些可能需要重新创建许多因素或特定系统环境设置（例如硬件，网络）的组合。该项目的目的是提供一个自动化框架，该框架使工程师可以有效地调试已部署系统中的并发故障。为了实现这一目标，该项目将调查和开发先进的静态和动态分析技术。具体而言，它将（i）开发轻量重量静态分析技术，以识别潜在的诱导失败程序路径； （ii）通过使用虚拟化来开发动态分析技术，以有效地再现由于非确定性和异质系统事件而在部署系统中发生的故障； （iii）实施一个自动调试框架，该框架提供丰富的用户界面以促进内部调试过程。该项目的结果将是一个可扩展，透明且能够处理广泛的并发故障的框架。使用框架的过程主要是自动化的，因此几乎不需要人类干预。因此，该框架有望帮助开发人员理解和纠正部署系统中的故障，并为所有依赖此类系统的人提供好处。