PL Seminar announcement for Thursday, May 5, 2005

[Mary R Flesner]

Speaker: Radu Rugina, Cornell

Title: Error Detection using Shape Analysis with Local Reasoning

Time: Thursday May 5, 11:00am

Place: 3401 SC

Abstract:

Shape analyses are static analyses aimed at extracting invariants that
describe the "shapes" of dynamically allocated recursive structures.

Although existing shape analyses have been successful at verifying
complex heap manipulations, they have had limited success at being
practical for larger programs. In particular, they have not been
incorporated in scalable error-detection tools so far.

In this talk I will present a novel approach to shape analysis: using
local reasoning about individual heap locations, instead of global
reasoning about entire heap abstractions. The key feature of this
approach is a novel memory abstraction that models the heap using a set
of independent configurations, each of which characterizes one single
heap location. This approach makes it easier to build efficient
inter-procedural and incremental heap analyses.

I will also present a prototype implementation that uses shape analysis
to detect memory leaks and accesses through dangling pointers in C
programs.

The current results suggest that the local reasoning approach is both
sufficiently precise to accurately analyze a large class of heap
manipulation algorithms, and sufficiently lightweight to scale to larger
programs.

Speaker Bio:

Radu Rugina is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer
Science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from the University
of California, Santa Barbara in 2001. Between 1997 and 2001, he was a
visiting scholar at the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science. Radu
Rugina's research interests are in static analysis and compilation
techniques for program understanding, verification, and transformation.

He is particularly interested in the analysis of pointer-based programs
and its applications to error detection and memory management.

 

 

Molly Flesner
Rm.#4120
Thomas M.Siebel Cntr for CS
201 N. Goodwin
Urbana, IL  62802-2302

ph:217-244-6813   fax: 217-244-6500



 
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