[talks] Ari Rabkin talk starting in 5 minutes, room 302

[Mike Freedman]

Using Static Analysis to Diagnose Misconfigured Open Source Systems 
Software

Ariel Rabkin, University of California, Berkeley

Ten years ago, few software developers worked on distributed systems. 
Today, developers often run code on clusters, relying on large 
open-source software stacks to manage resources. These systems are 
challenging to configure and debug. Fortunately, developments in program 
analysis have given us new tools for managing the complexity of modern 
software. This talk will show how static analysis can help users 
configure their systems. I present a technique that builds an explicit 
table mapping a program's possible error messages to the options that 
might cause them. As a result, users can get immediate feedback on how 
to resolve configuration errors.

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Ariel Rabkin is a fifth (and final)-year PhD candidate in the RAD Lab at 
UC Berkeley, working with Randy Katz. He is formerly from Cornell 
University, AB 2006, MEng 2007). He is interested in software quality 
and software intelligibility. He expects to graduate in May 2012. His 
dissertation is about applying program analysis to system management, 
including automatically describing program configuration options and 
diagnosing configuration errors. He is a contributor to several open 
source projects, including Hadoop, the Chukwa log collection framework, 
and the JChord program analysis toolset.