1. CSC 591/791 Reliable Software Systems

2. Logistics Instructor: Guoliang Jin M & W 1:30-2:45PM, EBI 2015
EBII 2258
M & W 1:30-2:45PM, EBI 2015
TA/Grade: None
Web pages:
(still under construction)

3. Who Am I? Joined the Pack in Jan. 2015
Got my Ph.D. from UW-Madison in Dec. 2014
Interested in software system reliability
Focus: detecting, diagnosing, and fixing various kinds of software bugs

4. Who Are You? Name Program Research/employment interests
How does reliability relate to your interests?
Particular topics you are interested in?

5. Course Structure Read and discuss papers on software reliability
Papers from system, PL, and SE
Read every paper and present 2 or 3
Write review once every week
No textbook
No exam
Do a research-oriented project

6. General Policies Attend every class unless you have to miss it
Arrive on tome unless you have to be late

7. Grade Components Paper presentations: 20% Paper reviews: 20%
Class participation: 10%
Final project: 50%

8. Paper Presentations: 20%
Two papers on a related topic
Each presentation:
Around 25 min talk
Around 10 min discussion
Present 2-3 papers the whole semester
You can also suggest papers to read
Suggest papers together with your first review
Then we finalize the list and assign presenters

9. Presentation Tips Practice your talk!
Make sure the audience can follow you
Use examples
Do not just repeat the paper
More tips will be posted online

10. Paper Reviews: 20% One paper review for one paper every week
Limit yourself to 800 words
Discuss the following aspects:
Problem
Solution
The cool part
The flaw
Ideas for future work
Problems in understanding the paper

11. Review Tips
Submit your review on moodle no later than 11:59PM the day before class
Don’t simply repeat the paper
Check your spelling and grammer

12. Class Participation: 10%
Attend each class
Involved in the discussion

13. Final Project: 50% Group of one of two
You are encouraged to propose your project
Take the ownership of the project and push to get it published
More details in two weeks

14. Topics: Program Analysis Approaches
Static analysis
Dynamic analysis
Symbolic execution
Concolic testing
Delta debugging
Statistical debugging

15. Topics: Concurrency Bugs
Concurrency bug study
Data race
Atomicity
Deadlock
Automated fixing
Record & replay
Deterministic multithreading

16. Topic: Others Performance bugs C compiler bugs
Memory bug detection and fixing
Program invariants
Logging
Recovery
Automated assignments grading
Architecture support
Mobil system debugging
Distributed system debugging

17. Previous Work and Publications 1
Automated concurrency-bug fixing
Automated Atomicity-Violation Fixing, PLDI '11
Automated Concurrency-Bug Fixing, OSDI '12
Production-run multi-threaded software failure diagnosis
Instrumentation and Sampling Strategies for Cooperative Concurrency Bug Isolation, OOPSLA '10
Production-Run Software Failure Diagnosis via Hardware Performance Counters, ASPLOS '13
Leveraging the Short-Term Memory of Hardware to Diagnose Production-Run Software Failures, ASPLOS '14

18. Previous Work and Publications 2
Performance bug characteristics study and detection
Understanding and Detecting Real-World Performance Bugs, PLDI '12
Performance bug patch validation
Validating Library Usage Interactively, CAV '13
Concurrency bug detection
ConSeq: Detecting Concurrency Bugs through Sequential Errors, ASPLOS '11

19. Previous Work and Publications 3
More studies
What change history tells us about thread synchronization, FSE '15
Automatic Server Hang Bug Diagnosis: Feasible Reality or Pipe Dream? ICAC '15
Execution problem detection for cloud
CloudSeer: Workflow Monitoring of Cloud Infrastructures via Interleaved Logs, ASPLOS '16

20. High-level Approach
Use real-world data to guide the design of various tools
Real-world bug study
Real-world software evolution study
Design end-to-end tool chains
Bug understanding
Bug detection
Failure diagnosis
Bug fixing

21. Review One and Suggest Topics
Read “Checking System Rules Using System-Specific, Programmer-Written Compiler Extensions”
Skim “A few Billion Lines of code Later using static Analysis to find Bugs in the Real World”
Read “Towards Optimization-Safe Systems: Analyzing the Impact of Undefined Behavior”
Skim LLVM tutorial