Using Static Analysis to Diagnose
Misconfigured Open Source Systems Software

Ariel Rabkin, UC Berkeley

1:00pm Monday 5 March 2012, ITE 325b UMBC

Ten years ago, few software developers worked on distributed systems. Today, developers often run code on clusters, relying on large open-source software stacks to manage resources. These systems are challenging to configure and debug. Fortunately, developments in program analysis have given us new tools for managing the complexity of modern software. This talk will show how static analysis can help users configure their systems. I present a technique that builds an explicit table mapping a program's possible error messages to the options that might cause them. As a result, users can get immediate feedback on how to resolve configuration errors.

Ari Rabkin is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley working in the AMP lab. His current research interest is the software engineering and administration challenges of big-data systems. He is particularly interested in applying program analysis techniques to tasks like log analysis and configuration debugging. His broader interests focus on systems and security, including improving system usability by making systems easier to understand, the connections between computer science research and technology policy, developing program analysis techniques that work acceptably well on large, complex, messy software systems.

Host: Anupam Joshi
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information