Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date: Monday, June 19, 2000
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]
Speaker: Andy Blucher ( School of CS and SE, Monash University)
Description: Debugging large and complex systems by visualisation and
         analysis of traces


                        Abstract

Execution traces in various forms have been used in an ad hoc
and informal way by programmers for debugging programs since
the dawn of programming.

The theoretical characteristics of execution traces were defined
in the mid-1980s by Hoare's CSP language and Milner's CCS
language.  These provide formalisms for representing and reasoning
about traces.

The most obvious practical issues for using automatically
generated traces for debugging is the volume of trace data
produced and perturbation of the program execution.  While these
are important, the research project described in this seminar
explores the conjecture that visualizations of traces and the
analyses that support them will be useful for debugging large and
complex systems.

Execution traces are currently being generated by an enhanced
version of GDB, and recurring patterns are being identified by an
algorithm that runs in quadratic time.  An nlog(n) pattern
identification algorithm is under construction.

Open questions include how to represent patterns in traces,
identifying real problems to use the technique with, and
identifying the limits of the approach.


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars00/dept20000619