Title : 

Tackling Bugs in Multi-Threaded and Distributed Software Systems

Introduction: 

Our society is increasingly dependent on computer devices that process a large amount of data using a large variety of software. Software defects (i.e., bugs) pose unprecedented challenges to system dependability and efficiency. Recent study shows that software bugs cost more than 300 Billion Dollars' loss every year. 

This class will first introduce students to software bugs that are common and critical to modern software systems. Particularly, we will focus on timing-related bugs (i.e., concurrency bugs) in multi-threaded and distributed systems, and performance bugs that lead to inefficient computation and energy wastes. This class will then discuss software reliability techniques that tackle these bugs, including automated bug detection, failure prevention, failure recovery, failure diagnosis, and bug fixing techniques. 

Topics : 

Software reliability; software efficiency; distributed systems; multi-threaded software; program analysis; program monitoring; software bugs; automated bug detection; failure diagnosis; automated bug fixing. 

Reference materials: 

见课程大纲