Concurrent Program Metrics Drawn by Quasar

A concurrent program is intuitively associated with probability: the executions of the program can produce nondeterministic execution program paths due to the interleavings of threads, whereas some paths can always be executed more frequently than the others. An exploration of the probabilities on the execution paths is expected to provide engineers or compilers with support in helping, either at coding phase or at compile time, to optimize some hottest paths. However, it is not easy to take a static analysis of the probabilities on a concurrent program in that the scheduling of threads of a concurrent program usually depends on the operating system and hardware (e.g., processor) on which the program is executed, which may be vary from machine to machine. In this paper the authors propose a platform independent approach, called ProbPP, to analyzing probabilities on the execution paths of the multithreaded programs. The main idea of ProbPP is to calculate the probabilities on the basis of two kinds of probabilities: Primitive Dependent Probabilities (PDPs) representing the control dependent probabilities among the program statements and Thread Execution Probabilities (TEPs) representing the probabilities of threads being scheduled to execute. The authors have also conducted two preliminary experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of ProbPP, and the experimental results show that ProbPP can provide engineers with acceptable accuracy.

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Development of a concurrent program

Modeling in Event-B ◽

10.1017/cbo9781139195881.008 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 227-257

Author(s):

Jean-Raymond Abrial

Keyword(s):

Concurrent Program

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Staged concurrent program analysis

Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering - FSE '10 ◽

10.1145/1882291.1882301 ◽

2010 ◽

Cited By ~ 27

Author(s):

Nishant Sinha ◽

Chao Wang

Keyword(s):

Program Analysis ◽

Concurrent Program

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REACHABILITY TESTING: AN APPROACH TO TESTING CONCURRENT SOFTWARE

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering ◽

10.1142/s0218194095000241 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 05 (04) ◽

pp. 493-510 ◽

Cited By ~ 38

Author(s):

GWAN-HWAN HWANG ◽

KUO-CHUNG TAI ◽

TING-LU HUANG

Keyword(s):

Empirical Studies ◽

Concurrent Programs ◽

Concurrent Software ◽

Sequential Programs ◽

Concurrent Program ◽

Testing Approach ◽

Reachability Testing ◽

Deterministic Behavior

Concurrent programs are more difficult to test than sequential programs because of non-deterministic behavior. An execution of a concurrent program non-deterministically exercises a sequence of synchronization events called a synchronization sequence (or SYN-sequence). Non-deterministic testing of a concurrent program P is to execute P with a given input many times in order to exercise distinct SYN-sequences. In this paper, we present a new testing approach called reachability testing. If every execution of P with input X terminates, reachability testing of P with input X derives and executes all possible SYN-sequences of P with input X. We show how to perform reachability testing of concurrent programs using read and write operations. Also, we present results of empirical studies comparing reachability and non-deterministic testing. Our results indicate that reachability testing has advantages over non-deterministic testing.

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