Resource-Aware Program Analysis Via Online Abstraction Coarsening

Abstract

We present a new technique for developing a resource-aware program analysis. Such an analysis is aware of constraints on available physical resources, such as memory size, tracks its resource use, and adjusts its behaviors during fixpoint computation in order to meet the constraint and achieve high precision. Our resource-aware analysis adjusts behaviors by coarsening program abstraction, which usually makes the analysis consume less memory and time until completion. It does so multiple times during the analysis, under the direction of what we call a controller. The controller constantly intervenes in the fixpoint computation of the analysis and decides how much the analysis should coarsen the abstraction. We present an algorithm for learning a good controller automatically from benchmark programs. We applied our technique to a static analysis for C programs, where we control the degree of flow-sensitivity to meet a constraint on peak memory consumption. The experimental results with 18 real-world programs show that our algorithm can learn a good controller and the analysis with this controller meets the constraint and utilizes available memory effectively.