CHESS: Find and Reproduce Heisenbugs in Concurrent Programs

CHESS is a tool for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs in concurrent programs. CHESS repeatedly runs a concurrent test ensuring that every run takes a different interleaving. If an interleaving results in an error, CHESS can reproduce the interleaving for improved debugging. CHESS is available for both managed and native programs.

People

Tom Ball
Research Manager/ Principal Researcher
Sebastian Burckhardt
Researcher
Shaz Qadeer
Principal Researcher
Madan Musuvathi
Principal Researcher
Peli de Halleux
Principal RSDE

Effective Data-Race Detection for the Kernel

John Erickson, Madan Musuvathi, Sebastian Burckhardt, Kirk Olynyk, in Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI'10), USENIX, October 1, 2010, View abstract, Download PDF

Line-Up: A Complete and Automatic Linearizability Checker

Sebastian Burckhardt, Chris Dern, Madan Musuvathi, Roy Tan, in Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 5, 2010, View abstract, Download PDF

GAMBIT: Effective Unit Testing for Concurrency Libraries

Katherine E. Coons, Madan Musuvathi, Sebastian Burckhardt, in Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., January 11, 2010, View abstract, Download PDF

LiteRace: Effective Sampling for Lightweight Data-Race Detection

Daniel Marino, Madan Musuvathi, Satish Narayanasamy, in Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '09), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 1, 2009, View abstract, Download PDF

Finding and Reproducing Heisenbugs in Concurrent Programs

Madan Musuvathi, Shaz Qadeer, Tom Ball, Gerard Basler, Piramanayakam Arumuga Nainar, Iulian Neamtiu, in OSDI 08: Eigth Symposium on Operating Systems Design & Implementation, USENIX, December 1, 2008, View abstract, Download PDF

Effective Program Verification for Relaxed Memory Models

Sebastian Burckhardt, Madan Musuvathi, in Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), Springer Verlag, July 1, 2008, View abstract, Download PDF

Memory Model Safety of Programs

Sebastian Burckhardt, Madan Musuvathi, in Workshop on Exploiting Concurrency Efficiently and Correctly (EC^2), July 1, 2008, View abstract, Download PDF

Effective Program Verification for Relaxed Memory Models

Sebastian Burckhardt, Madan Musuvathi, January 1, 2008, View abstract, Download PDF

Memory Model Sensitive Analysis of Concurrent Data Types

Sebastian Burckhardt, in Memory Model Sensitive Analysis of Concurrent Data Types, August 8, 2007, View abstract, Download PDF

Iterative context bounding for systematic testing of multithreaded programs

Madan Musuvathi, Shaz Qadeer, in PLDI 07: Programming Language Design and Implementation, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 1, 2007, View abstract, Download PDF

Iterative Context Bounding for Systematic Testing of Multithreaded Programs

Madan Musuvathi, Shaz Qadeer, January 1, 2007, View abstract, Download PDF

CMC: A pragmatic approach to model checking real code

Madan Musuvathi, David Park, Andy Chou, Dawson R. Engler, David L. Dill, in OSDI 02: Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, USENIX, December 1, 2002, View abstract, Download PDF

2008
- Katherine Coons, University of Texas at Austin
- Alexander Malkis, Freiburg University
- Vasu Singh, EPFL
2007
- Gerard Basler, ETH Zurich
- Tayfun Elmas, Koc University
- Piramanayagam Arumuga Nainar, University of Wisconsin at Madison
2006
- Iulian Neamtiu, University of Maryland at College Park

A number of people are experimenting with CHESS in course projects. The links below point to their project summaries. Thanks to these CHESS players for their work! Let us known if you have something to contribute!

Michael Bentley, Univ. Utah
Carson Jones, Univ. Utah

CHESS open source
CHESS Tutorial at PLDI 2009 [slides: ppt, pdf]
Channel 9 video on CHESS
Read the Dr. Dobb’s Journal article on CHESS, listen to Scott Hanselman’s interview about CHESS at PDC (go to 28:10), watch the video of the CHESS PDC presentation
Mary Jo Foley: Non-Microsoft developers to get a peek at CHESS concurrency test tool
MSDN article on Tools and Techniques to Identify Concurrency Issues

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