D-Cube: Tool for Dynamic Design Discovery from Multi-threaded Applications Using PIN

Abstract

Program comprehension is a major challenge for system maintenance. Reverse engineering has been employed for control-flow analysis of applications but not much work has been done for comprehending concurrent non-deterministic behavior of multi-threaded applications. We present D-CUBE, built using dynamic instrumentation APIs, which plugs in during execution and infers various thread models like concurrency, safety, data access, thread-pool state, exception model etc. for multi-threaded applications at runtime. We extract run-time events traced according to pre-specified logic and feed them to decision trees for inference. We use 3 benchmark suites (LOC: 50-3200) -- CDAC Pthreads benchmark [1] (18 Cases), Open POSIX Test-Suites [2] (21 Cases) and PARSEC 3.0 benchmarks [3] (3 Cases) for accuracy and volume testing and validate our approach by comparing the documented behavior of test-suites with D-CUBE's output models. We achieve over 90% accuracy. D-CUBE produces graphical event-traces with every inference for quick and effective comprehension of large code.