Eric Bodden

4°C

After only a little more than one and a half years, we were now able to publish the (extended) journal version of our RV07 paper on Collaborative Runtime Verification with Tracematches. What’s it about? The idea is simple: Assume you are doing runtime verification, but the nature of the property you want to monitor requires you to instrument some really hot loops in your code. In result, your instrumented program runs very slow. So why not split up the instrumentation load? Multiple users get different “probes” of instrumentation. Instrumentation can even be enabled only temporarily in order to reduce the overall runtime overhead. In this paper we showed that this approach works  and most importantly scales (see graphic to the right). Plus, we avoid any false positive (false warnings), due to a special pointer analysis of the verification property, even if the instrumentation is partially disabled and therefore certain events may be missed. The journal paper is very similar to the workshop paper but it’s self-contained. free download here

This the fourth post in a series of blog posts about frequently asked questions with using Soot. Today’s topic will be on packs and phases in Soot.

One frequent question that comes up on the Soot mailing list is when to run a particular analysis in Soot. Soot’s execution is divided in a set of different packs and each pack contains different phases. Therefore the question could be rephrased as “In which pack do I have to run my analysis or transformation?”. This tutorial tries to help you answer this question.

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I am happy to announce the winners of the annual Peephole Optimization Contest in COMP 520 (Compiler Design): Ning Jia, Alexis Malozemoff and Wei Wu. Congratulations!

As you can see in the results (PPTX), these students even managed to outperform javac in terms of the size of the generated code!

P.S. The above image is courtesy of Harlan Erskine, showing a piece of art of Jen Stark (and has nothing to do with the contest , in case you are wondering ).

Some people asked me about the slides of my FSE presentation. You can download the slides here. Note that you may need the PowerPoint 2007 player. Feedback  is welcome!

During the next fee days I will be enjoying FSE in Atlanta, where for some weird reason everything is called Peachtree <whatever>. I guess that must be an American thing. In Canada they don’t do that: if you search for a “Maple Road” in Montreal, where do you land? Wisconsin! Point proven

At FSE, I’ll be presenting our latest breed on static verification using tracematches. Who knows – maybe I’ll see you there?

I am proud to announce that the next “Jahrestreffen” of the Association of Alumni, Friends, and Supporters of the RWTH Aachen University in North America will take place in Montreal. The tentative dates of the meeting are Thursday, May 14th until Sunday May 17th, 2009. So whether you live in the U.S., in Mexico or in Canada already, come and join us for some truly Canadian experience! I will post a tentative program within the next couple of months.