[Colloq] Thesis Defense: Ana-Maria Visan: "Temporal Meta-Programming: Treating Time as a Spatial Dimension" on Thursday April 5th

[Nicole Bekerian]

The College of Computer and Information Science presents:

Thesis Defense
Speaker: Ana-Maria Visan

Date: Thursday, April 5, 2011
Time: 10:00am
Location: 366 WVH

Title:
Temporal Meta-Programming: Treating Time as a Spatial Dimension

Abstract:
Reversible debuggers have existed since the early 1970s. However, they are not widely used, with the possible exception of GDB.  GDB's "target record" is useful only when the cause of the bug is close in time to the bug manifestation.  When the cause of the bug is far away from the manifestation, one resorts to a series of debugging sessions with the goal of narrowing down the cause of the bug.  Thanks to reverse execution, it is possible to jump back and forth to any time of the execution.

In this dissertation, we present a new reversible debugging platform, based on checkpoint, restart, re-execute and decomposition of histories of debugging commands. Our platform can reversibly debug real-world multithreaded programs, such as MySQL, on multi-core architectures.

I will present a novel tool implemented on top of this reversible debugging platform, called reverse expression watchpoint. Reverse expression watchpoint helps the user diagnose bugs, for which the cause of the bug is far away from the manifestation. Once a failed invariant is identified by the user, it is desired to automatically locate a program statement inside a debugger, such as GDB, where the invariant holds, but it will fail at the next immediate statement.  This approach is different than GDB's software watchpoints.
Reverse expression watchpoint performs large jumps in time and it takes advantage of multi-core architectures during replay.

Committee:
* Gene Cooperman (advisor)
* Peter Desnoyers
* Engin Kirda
* Robert Harrison (external)


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Best, 
Nicole 

______________________________________________________________ 

Nicole Bekerian 
Administrative Assistant 

Northeastern University 
College of Computer and Information Science 
360 Huntington Ave. 
202 West Village H 
Boston, MA 02115 

Phone: 617.373.2462 
Fax: 617.373.5121