Detail

Publication date: 1 de June, 2021

PADTAD 2008 – Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis and Debugging

The PADTAD 2008 workshop is a day and a half event at ISSTA 2008 focusing on techniques and systems that aid in the testing, analysis, and debugging of multi-threaded/parallel/distributed applications systems. The workshop has a practical and applied emphasis on systems that have been implemented in (at least) prototype form. This workshop concentrates on works whose main contributions are in the field of testing and debugging.

Although debuggers and profilers are the traditional examples of these tools on sequential machines, there are issues unique to Multi-threaded/Parallel/Distributed systems that are not commonly addressed. Examples of such significant challenges in Multi-threaded/Parallel/Distributed systems include deadlock, load imbalance, data sharing patterns, race conditions, and contention. In order to find certain classes of bugs in Multi-threaded/Parallel/Distributed applications, specific timing conditions are required. As a result, timing bugs are found very late in the testing process or by end users. Many established testing techniques and tools are insufficient for non-sequential programs.

Support for students, especially paper authors, is being provided by our sponsors. For applications, please contact Shmuel Ur.

A special session will focus on teaching students and professionals how to develop Multi-threaded/Parallel/Distributed systems. In addition to dealing with the input space, developers of such systems also need to know how to deal with the huge space of possible schedules. Another inherent Difficulty is non-determinism. As a result, locally reviewing Multi-threaded/Parallel/Distributed code does not reveal all of its possible behaviors while overcoming non-determinism requires domain specific testing techniques such as replay. We are soliciting abstracts as well as regular papers on teaching how to design, test, and verify Multi-threaded/Parallel/Distributed systems. Discussion of overall approach, useful exercises and projects, experience reports, etc., are welcome.

---