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Abstract

In the past, researchers have developed specialized programs to aid programmers in detecting concurrent programming errors such as deadlocks, livelocks, starvation, and data races. In this work, we propose a language extension to the aspect-oriented programming language AspectJ, in the form of three new pointcuts, lock(), unlock(), and maybeShared(). These pointcuts allow programmers to monitor program events where locks are granted or handed back, and where values are accessed that may be shared among multiple Java threads. We decide thread locality using a static thread-local-objects analysis developed by others. Using the three new primitive pointcuts, researchers can directly implement efficient monitoring algorithms to detect concurrent-programming errors online. As an example, we describe a new algorithm which we call Racer, an adaption of the well-known Eraser algorithm to the memory model of Java. We implemented the new pointcuts as an extension to the AspectBench Compiler, implemented the Racer algorithm using this language extension, and then applied the algorithm to the NASA K9 Rover Executive and two smaller programs. Our experiments demonstrate that our implementation is effective in finding subtle data races. In the Rover Executive, Racer finds 12 data races, with no false warnings. Only one of these races was previously known.

Details

10000008
Title
Aspect-Oriented Race Detection in Java
Publication title
Volume
36
Issue
4
Pages
509-527
Publication year
2010
Publication date
Jul/Aug 2010
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society
Place of publication
New York
Country of publication
United States
Publication subject
ISSN
00985589
e-ISSN
19393520
CODEN
IESEDJ
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Feature
ProQuest document ID
732187108
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/aspect-oriented-race-detection-java/docview/732187108/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Copyright IEEE Computer Society Apr 2010
Last updated
2024-12-02
Database
ProQuest One Academic