| NSF Org: |
CCF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | June 24, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 24, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1526270 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Anindya Banerjee
abanerje@nsf.gov (703)292-7885 CCF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | April 30, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $450,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $450,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
926 DALNEY ST NW ATLANTA GA US 30318-6395 (404)894-4819 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
225 North Ave NW Atlanta GA US 30332-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Software & Hardware Foundation |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Title: SHF:Small:New Frontiers in Constraint-Based Program Analysis
Constraint-based analysis is a popular approach to program analysis: it allows to separate analysis specification from analysis implementation, it enables sophisticated implementations by leveraging advances in off-the-shelf solvers, and it provides natural program specifications as constraints. This project proposes Dominoes, a framework that extends the benefits of constraint-based analysis by enabling automatic synthesis of common and emerging use-cases of program analyses, such as finding good abstractions, analyzing incomplete programs, and incorporating user feedback. The intellectual merit of this project is to fundamentally advance demand-driven, compositional, and learning-based analysis techniques. By automatically synthesizing use-cases once and for all, Dominoes amplifies the traditional benefits of constraint-based analysis, liberating analysis designers from having to re-implement those use-cases for their analyses. The project's broader significance and importance lies in enhancing the applicability and usefulness of program analyses by making them more automated, scalable, and flexible. Artifacts embodying these analyses will improve software quality in aspects of reliability, security, performance, and energy efficiency. Dominoes will also improve the productivity of analysis users by allowing them to adapt analyses to their feedback.
Dominoes automatically synthesizes implementations of use-cases for any program analysis expressed in Datalog, a popular declarative logic programming language. Existing constraint-based analysis frameworks predominantly focus on solving hard constraints, whereas Dominoes also accommodates soft constraints that arise naturally in diverse use-cases of program analysis, e.g., to model various tradeoffs, intuitions of analysis users, and missing program specifications. The versatility of Dominoes is demonstrated by applying it to three important use-cases: client-driven analysis, summary-based analysis, and user-guided analysis. Despite their diversity, all three use-cases entail solving instances of the maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) problem, which consists of a combination of hard (inviolable) constraints and soft (violable) constraints. Solving such mixed constraints is not only computationally hard but also poses the problem of specifying weights or confidences of soft constraints. Dominoes develops MaxSAT optimizations comprising demand-driven, compositional, and learning-based methods that are general and independent of any analysis, use-case, or solver, and aim to scale to instances well beyond the reach of existing MaxSAT solvers.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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