Rice Computer Science: <title>Rice Computer Science-Colloquia
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Rice Computer Science
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Rice University
Department of Computer Science
presents

Zhendong Su
University of California - Berkeley

Constraint Simplification for Scalable Program Analysis

Abstract

Scalable program analysis is becoming more and more important, because of the tremendous growth in the size and complexity of programs and applications such as advanced compiler optimizations, software engineering tools, and type systems for advanced languages. However, it remains challenging to design effective analyses for large software systems.

Often, static analysis can be viewed as generating constraints describing the relationships among the constructs in a program. Analysis then reduces to finding a suitable solution to these constraints. In this talk, I will discuss practical and theoretical results on implementing scalable analyses through constraint simplification.

I will first illustrate that constraint simplification is a key to scalability by presenting a static analysis based on a simple form of subtyping for analyzing production-size factory control software. I will then present some heuristics for simplifying general subtyping constraints. These techniques have enabled a cubic time alias analysis for C programs to be applied to programs with half a million source lines in a matter of seconds, which is orders of magnitude larger than what could previously be analyzed. Finally, I will present theoretical results on more powerful simplifications of subtyping constraints. The problems considered here have resisted many competent attacks for almost ten years. Answers to these questions can enable the implementation of many powerful program analysis and advanced type systems.

Monday, March 11, 2002 at 3p.m. in Duncan Hall 1070
A reception in DH 3092 will follow the talk.

About Zhendong Su

Dr. Zhendong Su received the BA/BS degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and the MS/PhD degree from the University of California at Berkeley. his research interests are in error detection and program understanding tools, constraints, type systems, and programming language semantics, formal verification, model checking, and them proving, and decision procedures, tree automata theory.

Dr. Su is a faculty candidate.

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