Steve Reiss is going to present an overview of his current research work.

Speaker: Steve Reiss

  • Date: December 16th, 2011 (Friday)
  • Room: CIT 345
  • Title: "What is My Program Doing? Program Dynamic in Programmer's Terms"
  • Abstract:
Programmers need to understand their systems. They need to understand how they work. They need to understand why they perform well or poorly and whether they are making effective use of the underlying resources. They need to understand when the systems are not working correctly and then understand the reasons for failure. They need to understand when the system is behaving abnormally. Much of this understanding involves understanding the dynamic behavior of complex software systems. These system can involve multiple processes, multiple threads, thousands of classes, millions of lines of code, and a variety of transactions, tasks, and external events. The systems typically are designed to run continuously, often running for months at a time. We look at the problem of using dynamic analysis and visualization to help programmers achieve the necessary understanding. To be effective this needs to be done on running applications with minimal overhead and in the high-level terms programmers use to think about their system. After going over past efforts in this area we look at our current work and then present a number of challenges for the future.