Concurrency Assertions – Providing the Right Semantics to ASSERT Statements

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Madan Musuvathi, Microsoft Research
• Thursday 24 November 2011, 14:00-15:00
• Small lecture theatre, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins.

This event may be recorded and made available internally or externally via http://research.microsoft.com. Microsoft will own the copyright of any recordings made. If you do not wish to have your image/voice recorded please consider this before attending

This work is motivated by the observation that existing implementations of ASSERT statements are broken in important ways for concurrent programs. Concurrency assertions fix these problems by 1) Evaluating the assertion expression atomically, and 2) Taking the program checkpoint atomically with the evaluation on a failure

These ensure that the assertion expression is not concurrently modified during evaluation and that the checkpoint generated on a failure represents a valid violating program state.

Apart from fixing the semantics, concurrency assertions improve the chances of an assertion failure by continuously evaluating the assertion expression for a randomly chosen time window. During this window, any concurrent write that violates the expression will trigger a failure.

We have implemented concurrency assertions for C/C++ programs. In this talk, I will describe our design choices, our implementation, and our experience in using concurrency assertions on SQL Server.

This is work in progress, and done jointly with Jacob Burnim (U.C. Berkeley) and Shaz Qadeer (MSR).

This talk is part of the Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Guy Emerson's list
• Interested Talks
• Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks
• Optics for the Cloud
• PMRFPS's
• School of Technology
• Small lecture theatre, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• personal list
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.