CSR:Medium:Improving Software Reliability and Security Through Multicore Technology

社会在很大程度上依赖于计算机的正常和安全运行。不幸的是，软件继续受到错误和安全漏洞的困扰，随着多核处理器的普及和更多程序的多线程化，这些问题可能会变得更糟。然而，多核技术也提供了在商用计算机上使用并行性来提高软件健壮性的机会。这项研究旨在通过使用多核处理器来实现新型强大的运行时检查，从而提高软件的可靠性和安全性。该项目将使在多核系统上并行运行检查成为可能，同时保留同样强大的安全保证和顺序运行检查的简单编程模型。该项目还将研究如何通过将数据竞争检测工作卸载到其他核上，为运行在多处理器上的多线程程序启用在线数据竞争检测和确定性重放。最后，该项目将研究由推测性并行检查、多核处理器和确定性重放支持的强大的新型运行时检查类。这项研究将通过开发使软件系统更加可靠和安全的技术，以及通过生产可被其他团体使用的开源软件工件，使社会受益。该项目还将为教授如何为多核计算机编程的课程提供材料。

Society depends heavily on computers functioning correctly and securely. Unfortunately, software continues to be plagued by bugs and security vulnerabilities, and these problems are likely to get worse as multicore processors become ubiquitous and more programs become multithreaded. Yet multicore technology also provides the opportunity to use parallelism on commodity computers to improve software robustness.This research seeks to improve the reliability and security of software by using multicore processors to enable new types of powerful, run-time checks. The project will make it possible to run checks in parallel on multicore systems, while preserving the same strong safety guarantees and simple programming model of running checks sequentially. The project will also study how to enable online data race detection and deterministic replay for multithreaded programs running on multiprocessors by offloading the work of data race detection onto other cores. Finally, the project will study powerful, new classes of run-time checks that are enabled by speculative parallel checks, multicore processors, and deterministic replay.This research will benefit society by developing techniques to make software systems more reliable and secure and by producing open-source software artifacts that can be used by other groups. The project will also contribute material for courses that teach how to program multicore computers.