Static Analysis of Multi-Core Applications

Multi-core architectures, which recently have become pervasive, exposed the software-engineering community to a host of challenges. Applications that want to take a full advantage of a multi-core processor must be explicitly parallelized—a process that is hard and error prone. Additionally, the programs that have already been parallelized and shown to work robustly on a single-core processor often become unstable when migrated to a multi-core machine. We propose a tool that discovers bugs in concurrent programs, including data races, atomicity violations, and errors specific to multi-core platforms. The tool will combine static and dynamic analysis to systematically explore the state-space of a program and discover flaws. To use the tool, a user will provide an executable version of their concurrent program. The tool will produce a list of discovered flaws and allow the user to “replay” concurrent executions that demonstrate each flaw.