SI2-SSI: Collaborative Research: A Sustainable Infrastructure for Performance, Security, and Correctness Tools

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Software has become indispensable to society, used by computational scientists for science and engineering, by analysts mining big data for value, and to connect society over the Internet. However, the properties of software systems for any of these purposes cannot be understood without accounting for code transformations applied by optimizing compilers used to compose algorithm and data structure templates, and libraries available only in binary form. To address this need, this project will overhaul, integrate, and enhance static binary analysis and runtime technologies to produce components that provide a foundation for performance, correctness, and security tools. The project will build upon three successful and widely adopted open source software packages: the DynInst library for analysis and transformation of application binaries, the MRNet infrastructure for control of large-scale parallel executions and data analysis of their results, and the HPCToolkit performance analysis tools. The project team will engage the community to participate in the design and evaluation of the emerging components, as well as to adopt its components. This project will have a wide range of impacts. First, software components built by the project will enable the development of sophisticated, high-quality, end-user performance, correctness, and security tools built by the project team, as well as others in academia, government, and industry. Software developed by the project team will help researchers and developers tackle testing, debugging, monitoring, analysis, and tuning of applications for systems at all scales. Second, end-user tools produced by the project have a natural place in the classroom to help students write efficient, correct, and secure programs. Third, components produced by the project will lower the barrier for new researchers to enter the field and build tools that have impact on production applications without years of investment. Fourth, the project will provide training for graduate students and interns in the area of software for performance, correctness, and security. Finally, through workshops and tutorials, the project will disseminate project results, provide training to enable others to leverage project software, and grow a community of tool researchers who depend on project components and thus have a strong motivation to help sustain project software into the future.Modernizing open-source software components and tools for binary analysis will enable static analysis of application characteristics at the level of executable machine code, transformation of binaries to inject monitoring code, measurement to capture a detailed record of application?s interactions with all facets of a target platform, analysis of recorded data in parallel, and attribution of analysis results back to application source code in meaningful ways. Providing innovative, software components that support development of robust performance, correctness, and security tools will accelerate innovation by tools researchers and help them grapple with the increasing complexity of modern software. Of particular note, helping tools researchers and computational scientists grapple with the challenges of software for modern parallel systems and producing training materials that help people use this software, addresses several of the needs identified in the NSF Vision for Cyberinfrastructure for the 21st Century.