Title: Enhance Your Log for Fun and Profit

Speaker: Prof. Yuanyuan Zhou，Qualcomm Chair Professor at UC-San Diego

Time: July 8,2011 10:00 AM

Place: FIT 1-315

Abstract:

Diagnosing software failures in the field is notoriously difficult, in part due to the fundamental complexity of trouble-shooting any complex software system, but further exacerbated by the paucity of information that is typically available in the production setting. Indeed, for reasons of both overhead and privacy, it is common that only the run-time log generated by a system (e.g., syslog) can be shared with the developers. Unfortunately, the ad-hoc nature of such reports are frequently insufficient for detailed failure diagnosis. One of our recent work aims to improve this situation within the rubric of existing practice. I will present a tool, LogEnhancer that automatically “enhances” existing logging code to aid in future post-failure debugging. We evaluate LogEnhancer on eight large, real-world applications and demonstrate that it can dramatically reduce the set of potential root failure causes that must be considered during diagnosis while imposing negligible overheads.

Bio:

Yuanyuan Zhou is currently a Qualcomm Chair Professor at UC-San Diego. She is a member of Tsinghua University's EMC Chair Professor Group. Before UCSD, she was a tenured associate professor at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She has also worked at NEC Research Institute as a scientist after completing her Ph.D at Princeton in 2000. Her research interests span the areas of operating systems, architecture, system reliability and maintainability. She was the recipient for the Alfred Sloan Fellowship 2007, UIUC Gear Faculty Award 2006, NSF Career-2004 award, the CRA-W Anita-Borg Early Career Award 2005, the DOE Early Career Principle Investigator Award 2005, the IBM Faculty Award 2004 & 2005, and the IBM SUR-2003 award. She has 3 papers selected into the IEEE Micro Special Issue on Top Picks from Architecture Conferences and best paper at SOSP. She and her students have released several software quality assurance tools that are currently being used in commercial companies and open source projects for large software. Her recent innovation in detecting bugs in parallel programs has been licensed to Intel. She has actively served in program committees of various top venues including SOSP, ASPLOS, ISCA, PLDI, HPCA, etc . She was the program co-chair for USENIX Annual Technical Conference-2008, and Asian-Pacific System 2011. She has successfully placed her Ph.D students as professors at top univiersities such as University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Waterloo and Ohio-State University, as well as top research labs and start-up co-founders.