May/must analysis and the DFAGen data-flow analysis generator

Abstract

a b s t r a c tData-flow analysis is a common technique for gathering program information for use in program transformations such as register allocation, dead-code elimination, common subexpression elimination, and scheduling. Current tools for generating data-flow analysis implementations enable analysis details to be specified orthogonally to the iterative analysis algorithm but still require implementation details regarding the may and must use and definition sets that occur due to the effects of pointers, side effects, arrays, and user-defined structures. This paper presents the Data-Flow Analysis Generator tool (DFAGen), which enables analysis writers to generate analyses for separable and nonseparable data-flow analyses that are pointer, aggregate, and side-effect cognizant from a specification that assumes only scalars. By hiding the compiler-specific details behind predefined set definitions, the analysis specifications for the DFAGen tool are typically less than ten lines long and similar to those in standard compiler textbooks. The main contribution of this work is the automatic determination of when to use the may or must variant of a predefined set usage in the analysis specification.

The Influence of Alias and References Escape on Java Program Analysis

“…Exception branches, exception plateaus, and exception exits for methods and method calls are introduced as additional control flow structures for analysis of exception handling 7,11,12 . Data flow analysis can be classified into two categories: flow-sensitive and flow-insensitive.…”

Bridging the chasm between MDE and the world of compilation

“…Because of the genericity of the technique, several dataflow analysis workbenches (some of them leveraging DSLs) have been proposed [30,31,32]. Their goal is to help automate part (or all) the implementation of a dataflow analysis for a given compiler infrastructure and a (family of) languages.…”

“…For example, BEG [44] and BURG [45] are two tools which are used to generate processor instruction selectors, and PAG [30] and DFAGen [32] are two dataflow analysis generators. Such tools could benefit from a shift from the program level (i.e., model level) to the programming language level (i.e., metamodel level) of compilation techniques (e.g., transformation paradigms presented in Section 2.3).…”

Final Report for Colorado State University

“…a public domain suite of software for program analysis (i.e. OpenAnalysis, UseOA-ROSE, UseOA-Open64) that is currently being used in software tools being developed at Argonne, 2. the development of linearity analysis for use in improving the performance of the adjoint code generated by automatic differentiation tools, 3. a domain-specific programming language based on set building notation for specifying dataflow analyses at a high-level of abstraction with a compiler that generates the full data-flow analysis implementation, 4. theory and a prototype implementation for performing data-flow program analysis of MPI programs, 5. and the development of a parallel, network protocol simulation framework (which turns out to be similar to data-flow analysis frameworks) in collaboration with networking researchers at CSU.The above research contributions have resulted in 10 conference and workshop publications [17,16,4,14,6,8,9,12,13,5], 2 journal papers [19,11], a master's thesis [10], a conference paper still in submission [2], and a journal paper under preparation [15]. At Colorado State University, this project supported one graduate student for four years, provided some summer salary for the PI, and provided some hourly support for an undergraduate research assistant.…”

“…The above research contributions have resulted in 10 conference and workshop publications [17,16,4,14,6,8,9,12,13,5], 2 journal papers [19,11], a master's thesis [10], a conference paper still in submission [2], and a journal paper under preparation [15]. At Colorado State University, this project supported one graduate student for four years, provided some summer salary for the PI, and provided some hourly support for an undergraduate research assistant.…”