Guest Speaker: Baris Kasikci

Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan

All dates for this event occur in the past.

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Baris Kasikci
480 Dreese Labs
2015 Neil Ave, Columbus, Ohio 43210

Towards Pervasive In-Production Failure Diagnosis

Diagnosing bugs—the process of understanding the root causes of failures—is hard. Developers depend on reproducing bugs to diagnose them. Traditionally, systems that attempt to reproduce bugs record fine-grained events that lead to failures. Alas, recording incurs high runtime overhead, making existing techniques unsuitable in production.

In this talk, I will discuss two techniques that do not require fine-grained and expensive recording. The first technique is failure sketching, which produces easy-to-understand explanations of events that lead to a failure. I will then introduce Lazy Diagnosis, a hybrid dynamic-static interprocedural pointer and type analysis for diagnosing the root causes of bugs. Lazy Diagnosis uses modern hardware support and a surprising property of multithreaded programs in the real world to eliminate scalability problems in Failure Sketching. We are in the process of deploying our lazy diagnosis prototype in hundreds of millions of computers. Finally, I will discuss how our findings can be used to build more efficient in-production bug detection and record/replay techniques.

Bio: Baris Kasikci is an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. His research is centered around developing techniques that help developers build more reliable, secure, and efficient software. He is also interested in system support for emerging hardware platforms, efficient runtime instrumentation, hardware and runtime support for enhancing system security, and program analysis. Previously, he was a researcher in the Systems and Networking Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He completed his PhD in the Dependable Systems Laboratory (DSLAB) at EPFL, and he previously held roles at Intel, WMware and Siemens. He received the VMware Graduate Fellowship in 2014. He is the recipient of the 2016 Roger Needham PhD Award for the best PhD thesis in computer systems in Europe and the 2016 Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize for best PhD thesis in the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at EPFL.

Host: Mike Bond