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.