Rapid Development of Dynamic Program Analyses

You are cordially invited to attend the PhD Dissertation Defense of Philippe MORET on Thursday, July 21st 2011 at 14h00 in room A13 (Red building)

Abstract:
As software is becoming increasingly complex, developers need more support to debug, understand, optimize and test programs. Dynamic analysis tools designed to help them in these tasks become more and more important. It is essential to provide effective ways to implement relevant tools and to help interpreting the data collected by dynamic analyses.

In this thesis, we focus on tools implemented for virtual machines, such as the Java Virtual Machine. We present novel techniques to ease the development of tools based on bytecode instrumentation, amongst other we tackle important issues such as the instrumentation of shared libraries. In addition, we present a framework based on aspect-oriented programming that allows the implementation of dynamic analyses with a higher level of abstraction and supports transparent composition of tools.

Subsequently, we present two profiling tools benefiting from our instrumentation techniques: a calling context profiler for platform independent profiling and a cross-profiler targeting embedded Java processors.

Finally, in order to help the user of analysis tools to take advantage of the data collected by our profilers, we introduce novel visualizations for Calling Context Trees, a commonly used structure for calling context profiling. Our approach provide ways to help exploring huge profiling structures and identifying hotspots.

Dissertation Committee:

• Prof. Walter Binder, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland (Research Advisor)
• Prof. Matthias Hauswirth, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland (Internal Member)
• Prof. Mehdi Jazayeri, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland (Internal Member)
• Prof. Nigel Horspool, University of Victoria, Canada (External Member)
• Prof. Andreas Krall, Technische Universität Wien, Austria (External Member)
• Prof. Éric Tanter, University of Chile, Chile (External Member)