CS618 : Program Analysis 2020-2021

Welcome to the course homepage. Your instructor is Uday Khedker. We will meet online in slot 11 (every Tuesday and Friday from 15:30 to 17:00). A brief motivation behind the course and a tentative lecture schedule is available. We will use the book Data Flow Analysis: Theory and Practice as our text book. We have an Indian edition too. The TAs of the course are Mehul Jain, Rasesh Tongia, and Mudra Sahu.

Announcements

(16 Aug 2020). I have consolidated the course material (videos, slides, tutorials, quizzes, and experiments) in this page outside of moodle for the time being. This page will move to moodle after the course registration is finalized.
(15 Aug 2020). All lectures will now be available on the youtube channel for cs618. You can begin by visiting the playlists of the lectures. Each playlist represents one lecture and each lecture has been divided into multiple videos for convenience of downloading.
(10 Aug 2020). Join the course on MS Teams using the code 0vj8vqe. Note that you can join the course only if you log using your IITB LDAP id using SSO. For this week, we meet at 4:05 pm to 5:00 pm on Thursday 13 Aug. In the subsequent weeks, we meet at 3:30 to 5:00 pm on Tuesdays and Fridays.
(10 Aug 2020). Videos of the introductory lecture of the course and the associated slides are available.
(10 Aug 2020). All announcements will soon be made on the moodle page of the course. This page will then not be updated.

Motivation and Philosophy

The course begins with why and what of program analysis by presenting examples of optimizations and motivating the need for systematic analysis. As the course progresses, the following running theme emerges: Program analysis requires building the right abstractions. Here by abstractions we mean both an abstract view of the program being analyzed and a systematic analysis technique to build such a view. The course shows this by introducing a series of analyses from simple analyses to more general and advanced analyses. Each analysis is chosen with a specific goal in mind. As a new analysis is introduced, it:

Addresses a different practical need not addressed (or not addressed well enough) by the previous analyses.
Stretches the concepts or the techniques introduced earlier and introduces either new abstractions or extends the abstractions introduced earlier.
Emphasizes the connection between theory and practice by showing how a small number of well chosen theoretical concepts can serve a rather large set of practical needs and how practical needs force the evolution of new theoretical concepts.
Shows how to formulate a new analysis and highlights key concerns to be kept in mind while formulating an analysis.

Although the analyses chosen are driven by a practical needs, the twin goals behind choosing specific analyses are:

to cover a large set of needs that may arises, and
to convey well identified core ideas.

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