Parallelizing top-down interprocedural analyses

• Authors: Aws Albarghouthi;Rahul Kumar;Aditya V. Nori;Sriram K. Rajamani
• Venue: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
• Year: 2012

Modularity is a central theme in any scalable program analysis. The core idea in a modular analysis is to build summaries at procedure boundaries, and use the summary of a procedure to analyze the effect of calling it at its calling context. There are two ways to perform a modular program analysis: (1) top-down and (2) bottomup. A bottom-up analysis proceeds upwards from the leaves of the call graph, and analyzes each procedure in the most general calling context and builds its summary. In contrast, a top-down analysis starts from the root of the call graph, and proceeds downward, analyzing each procedure in its calling context. Top-down analyses have several applications in verification and software model checking. However, traditionally, bottom-up analyses have been easier to scale and parallelize than top-down analyses. In this paper, we propose a generic framework, BOLT, which uses MapReduce style parallelism to scale top-down analyses. In particular, we consider top-down analyses that are demand driven, such as the ones used for software model checking. In such analyses, each intraprocedural analysis happens in the context of a reachability query. A query Q over a procedure P results in query tree that consists of sub-queries over the procedures called by P. The key insight in BOLT is that the query tree can be explored in parallel using MapReduce style parallelism -- the map stage can be used to run a set of enabled queries in parallel, and the reduce stage can be used to manage inter-dependencies between queries. Iterating the map and reduce stages alternately, we can exploit the parallelism inherent in top-down analyses. Another unique feature of BOLT is that it is parameterized by the algorithm used for intraprocedural analysis. Several kinds of analyses, including may analyses, mustanalyses, and may-must-analyses can be parallelized using BOLT. We have implemented the BOLT framework and instantiated the intraprocedural parameter with a may-must-analysis. We have run BOLT on a test suite consisting of 45 Microsoft Windows device drivers and 150 safety properties. Our results demonstrate an average speedup of 3.71x and a maximum speedup of 7.4x (with 8 cores) over a sequential analysis. Moreover, in several checks where a sequential analysis fails, BOLT is able to successfully complete its analysis.