Symbolic reasoning for automatic signal placement
Abstract
Explicit signaling between threads is a perennial cause of bugs in concurrent programs. While there are several run-time techniques to automatically notify threads upon the availability of some shared resource, such techniques are not widely-adopted due to their run-time overhead. This paper proposes a new solution based on static analysis for automatically generating a performant explicit-signal program from its corresponding implicit-signal implementation. The key idea is to generate verification conditions that allow us to minimize the number of required signals and unnecessary context switches, while guaranteeing semantic equivalence between the source and target programs. We have implemented our method in a tool called Expresso and evaluate it on challenging benchmarks from prior papers and open-source software. Expresso-generated code significantly outperforms past automatic signaling mechanisms (avg. 1.56x speedup) and closely matches the performance of hand-optimized explicit-signal code.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jun 11, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3296979.3192395
Entities
People
- Işıl Dillig
- Jacob Van Geffen
- Kostas Ferles
- Yannis Smaragdakis
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- European Research Council
- National Science Foundation
- National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
- University of Texas at Austin