Reliable, Secure, and Efficient Multithreading

The massive number of services powered by cloud computing and the rise of multicore hardware have caused multithreaded programs to become increasingly pervasive and critical. Yet, these programs are extremely difficult to write, optimize, test, debug, and verify, and often contain many difficult-to-debug “heisenbugs” that compromise security and reliability. We're developing techniques and methodologies to make parallel programs run reliably, securely, and efficiently. One ongoing idea we're investigating is to memoize schedules and reuse them on future inputs if possible, so that the schedules tested are the ones run and that reproducing concurrency errors becomes much easier. Moreover, the memoized schedules effectively “predict” the future of the executions, allowing operating system schedulers to optimize thread scheduling and placement.