Title:
Improving Software Dependability with Hardware Support


Abstract:
As software permeates our daily life and becomes more and more complex, software dependability becomes increasingly important. The main obstacle to building dependable software is software bugs, which often account for 40% of computer system failures and over 50% of security vulnerabilities. The existing dynamic bug detection techniques suffer from high overhead and can greatly benefit from the recent impressive advances in computer architecture.

In this talk, I will present novel hardware support and new techniques for detecting software bugs in production runs. First, I will present a simple and general hardware framework called iWatcher that improves dynamic monitoring (for bug detection). The experiments show that iWatcher can be used to detect a wide variety of bugs with low overhead, orders of magnitude smaller than software-only dynamic checkers. Next, I will talk about a specific application of iWatcher for dynamic detection of general memory corruption bugs. The experiments show that this technique finds some bugs missed by the state-of-the-art industrial and academic tools. Finally, I will mention another application of iWatcher for incremental checking of data structure consistency that can help in localizing semantic bugs. Preliminary results show that this technique has a significantly lower overhead for large data structures than traditional techniques for checking consistency.


Bio:
Pin Zhou is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds an M.S. from Tsinghua University, China. Her research interests are hardware and system support for improving software dependability, operating systems, memory management, and storage systems. The work presented in this talk appeared at ISCA, MICRO, IEEE Micro's Top Picks, and ACM TACO. She received the W.J. Poppelbaum Memorial Award in 2004, an honor given to one or two graduate students every year in computer architecture at University of Illinois. Two of her papers were selected in the IEEE Micro Special Issue: Micro's Top Picks from Computer Architecture conferences in 2004. Further information is available at http://opera.cs.uiuc.edu/~pinzhou.