A multi-threaded approach for data-flow analysis

Abstract

Program analysis supporting software development is often part of edit-compile-cycles, and precise program analysis is time consuming. With the availability of parallel processing power on desktop computers, parallelization is a way to speed up program analysis. This requires a parallel data-flow analysis with sufficient work for each processing unit. The present paper suggests such an approach for object-oriented programs analyzing the target methods of polymorphic calls in parallel. With carefully selected thresholds guaranteeing sufficient work for the parallel threads and only little redundancy between them, this approach achieves a maximum speed-up of 5 (average 1.78) on 8 cores for the benchmark programs.