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Article

On optimal slicing of parallel programs

Authors:

Markus Müller-Olm,

Helmut SeidlAuthors Info & Claims

STOC '01: Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing

Pages 647 - 656

https://doi.org/10.1145/380752.380864

Published: 06 July 2001 Publication History

Abstract

Optimal program slicing determines for a statement S in a program π whether or not S affects a specified set of statements, given that all conditionals in π are interpreted as non-deterministic choices.

Only recently, it has been shown that reachability of program points and hence also optimal slicing is undecidable for multi-threaded programs with (parameterless) procedures and synchronization [23]. Here, we sharpen this result by proving that slicing remains undecidable if synchronization is abandoned---although reachability becomes polynomial. Moreover, we show for multi-threaded programs without synchronization, that slicing stays PSPACE-hard when procedure calls are forbidden, and becomes NP-hard for loop-free programs. Since the latter two problems can be solved in PSPACE and NP, respectively, even in presence of synchronization, our new lower bounds are tight.

Finally, we show that the above decidability and lower bound properties equally apply to other simple program analysis problems like copy constant propagation and true liveness of variables. This should be contrasted to the problems of strong copy constant propagation and (ordinary) liveness of variables for which polynomial algorithms have been designed [15, 14, 24].

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Cited By

Arora VBhatia RSingh M(2016)A systematic review of approaches for testing concurrent programsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.371128:5(1572-1611)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/cpe.3711
Nordhoff BMüller-Olm MLammich P(2013)Iterable Forward Reachability Analysis of Monitor-DPNsElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.129.24129(384-403)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2013
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.129.24
Silva J(2012)A vocabulary of program slicing-based techniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2187671.218767444:3(1-41)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2187671.2187674
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On optimal slicing of parallel programs
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
2. Theory of computation

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cover image ACM Conferences

STOC '01: Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing

July 2001

755 pages

ISBN:1581133499

DOI:10.1145/380752

Copyright © 2001 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 July 2001

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Cited By

Arora VBhatia RSingh M(2016)A systematic review of approaches for testing concurrent programsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.371128:5(1572-1611)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/cpe.3711
Nordhoff BMüller-Olm MLammich P(2013)Iterable Forward Reachability Analysis of Monitor-DPNsElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.129.24129(384-403)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2013
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.129.24
Silva J(2012)A vocabulary of program slicing-based techniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2187671.218767444:3(1-41)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2187671.2187674
Danicic SHierons RLaurence M(2012)Complexity of Data Dependence Problems for Program Schemas with ConcurrencyACM Transactions on Computational Logic10.1145/2159531.215953713:2(1-18)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2159531.2159537
Gawlitza TLammich PMüller-Olm MSeidl HWenner A(2011)Join-lock-sensitive forward reachability analysis for concurrent programs with dynamic process creationProceedings of the 12th international conference on Verification, model checking, and abstract interpretation10.5555/1946284.1946299(199-213)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1946284.1946299
Giffhorn D(2011)Advanced chopping of sequential and concurrent programsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-010-9114-719:2(239-294)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-010-9114-7
Gawlitza TLammich PMüller-Olm MSeidl HWenner A(2011)Join-Lock-Sensitive Forward Reachability Analysis for Concurrent Programs with Dynamic Process CreationVerification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_15(199-213)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_15
Qi XZhou XXu XZhang Y(2010)Slicing Concurrent Programs Based on Program Reachability GraphsProceedings of the 2010 10th International Conference on Quality Software10.1109/QSIC.2010.37(248-253)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/QSIC.2010.37
Russell JJacome M(2009)Program slicing across the hardware-software boundary for embedded systemsInternational Journal of Embedded Systems10.1504/IJES.2009.0272414:1(66)Online publication date: 2009
https://doi.org/10.1504/IJES.2009.027241
Giffhorn DHammer C(2009)Precise slicing of concurrent programsAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-009-0048-x16:2(197-234)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10515-009-0048-x
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