Pointer analysis for structured parallel programs

  • Authors:

  • Radu Rugina;Martin C. Rinard

  • Affiliations:

  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel interprocedural, flow-sensitive, and context-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm for multithreaded programs that may concurrently update shared pointers. The algorithm is designed to handle programs with structured parallel constructs, including fork-join constructs, parallel loops, and conditionally spawned threads. For each pointer and each program point, the algorithm computes a conservative approximation of the memory locations to which that pointer may point. The algorithm correctly handles a wide range of programming language constructs, including recursive functions, recursively generated parallelism, function pointers, structures, arrays, nested structures and arrays, pointer arithmetic, casts between different pointer types, heap and stack allocated memory, shared global variables, and thread-private global variables. We have implemented the algorithm in the SUIF compiler system and used the implementation to analyze a set of multithreaded programs written in the Cilk programming language. Our experimental results show that the analysis has good precision and converges quickly for our set of Cilk programs.