CHESS: An Automated Concurrency Testing Tool

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with current testing tools. Once CHESS locates an error, it provides a fully repeatable execution of the program leading to the error, thus greatly aiding the debugging process. In addition, CHESS provides a valuable and novel notion of test coverage suitable for multithreaded programs. CHESS can use existing concurrent test cases and is therefore easy to deploy. Both developers and testers should find CHESS useful.

More including a video can be found here: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/CHESS-An-Automated-Concurrency-Testing-Tool/

Podcast: Larry O'Brien Talks Concurrency!

DotNetRocks has published their latest podcast: Larry O'Brien Talks Concurrency!
From the site:

Larry O'Brien talks with Richard and Carl about how up and coming CPU architecture is going to invalidate current methods of concurrency programming, and what we can do about it.

For those old enough to believe that 8-bits is a perfectly reasonable size for an integer, Larry O'Brien may be remembered as the Editor of Computer Language and AI Expert magazines. Later, he was the founding Editor of Software Development and Game Developer Magazines. During the dot-com years, O'Brien served in a variety of technical and executive positions at a series of startups whose only commonality was that they all became stop-downs.



Today, O'Brien is known for his writing, which appears in a number of online and print outlets, including DevX, the developer sites of both Intel and AMD, and his "Windows and .NET Watch" column for SD Times. His blog post "Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers (And Any Episode of 24)" was selected for inclusion in The University of Michigan's "Best of Technology Writing 2007." In addition to writing, O'Brien works as an analyst of the software development industry and as a consultant specializing in architecting and implementing high-performance service-oriented systems.

Download it here: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=269