When visiting the IBM booth at SC07, I was a little surprised to learn that my non-concurrency analysis technology for OpenMP programs had also been adopted and implemented in the Parallel Tools Platform.
Beth Tibbitts from IBM has kindly sent me the reference details: STMCS’07 program, paper, and presentation.
The technology is used by Sun Studio Compilers to do static error check for OpenMP programs.
Adam Kolawa (Parasoft) said in his recent article on DDJ,
“Many people … want tools to find these bugs automatically. After 20 years of examining how and why errors occur, I believe this is the wrong response. Only a small class of errors can be found automatically; most bugs are related to functionality and requirements, and cannot be identified with just the click of a button.”
and
“Our current mission is to address this problem by inventing technologies and strategies to support the brain as it performs this evaluation. We are building automated infrastructures that provide maximum automation for mundane tasks (compiling code, building/running regression test suites, checking adherence to policies, supporting code reviews, and so on) in such a way that each day the brain is presented with the minimal information needed to determine if yesterday’s code modifications negatively impacted the application.”
There is probably no magic button one can push to turn a piece of legacy code that is not thread-safe into a thread-safe code. A tool should offload the mundane tasks from human brain which can be set free to finish the magic touch.
