ASP: Abstraction Subspace Partitioning for Detection of Atomicity Violations with an Empirical Study

Dynamic concurrency bug detectors predict and then examine suspicious instances of atomicity violations from executions of multithreaded programs. Only few predicted instances are real bugs. Prioritizing such instances can make the examinations cost-effective, but is there any design factor exhibiting significant influence? This work presents the first controlled experiment that studies two design factors, abstraction level and subspace, in partitioning such instances through 35 resultant partition-based techniques on 10 benchmarks with known vulnerability-related bugs. The empirical analysis reveals significant findings. First, partition-based prioritization can significantly improve the fault detection rate. Second, coarse-grained techniques are more effective than fine-grained ones, and using some one-dimensional subspaces is more effective than using other dimensional subspaces. Third, eight previously unknown techniques can be more effective than the technique modeled after a state-of-the-art dynamic detector.