Improving Automatic Centralization by Version Separation

With today’s importance of distributed applications, their verification and analysis are still challenging. They involve large combinational states, interactive network communications between peers, and concurrency. Although there are some dynamic analysis tools for analyzing the runtime behavior of a single-process application, they do not provide methods to analyze distributed applications as a whole, where multiple processes run simultaneously. Centralization is a general solution which transforms multi-process applications into a single-process one that can be directly analyzed by existing tools. In this paper, we improve the accuracy of centralization. Moreover, we extend it as a general framework for analyzing distributed applications with multiple versions. First, we formalize the version conflict problem and present a simple solution, and further propose an optimized solution to resolving class version conflicts during centralization. Our techniques enable sharing common code whenever possible while keeping the version space of each component application separate. Centralization issues like startup semantics and static field transformation are improved and discussed. We implement and apply our centralization tool to some network benchmarks. Experiments, where existing tools are used on the centralized application, prove the usefulness of our automatic centralization tool, showing that centralization enables these tools to analyze distributed applications with multiple versions.