Department of Computer Science Columbia University 1214 Amsterdam Ave 464 CS Building Mail Code 0401 New York, NY 10027 [ Publication | Projects | Teaching ]

I was a PhD student advised by Prof. Junfeng Yang in the Software Systems Lab, CS, Columbia. My research interests include operating systems, programming languages, and distributed systems, with particular focus on software reliability and security. I spent 6 years of happy time with my lovely advisor Junfeng and other professors and students in Columbia. Now I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Computer Science department of the University of Hong Kong. My new page is here.

Selected Publication

• Parrot: a Practical Runtime for Deterministic, Stable, and Reliable Threads [pdf | slides | video | code]
  Heming Cui, Jiri Simsa, Yi-Hong Lin, Hao Li, Ben Blum, Xinan Xu, Junfeng Yang, Garth Gibson, Randal E. Bryant
  Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '13), 2013
  

  Describes PARROT, a simple and deployable system for making threads deterministic and stable. PARROT is easy to use, fast, scalable, and it improves the state-space coverage of a state-of-the-art model checker, DBUG, by many orders of magnitude. Together with the code, we also released a benchmark suite with 100+ multithreaded programs, and PARROT's complete results on these programs.

• Determinism Is Not Enough: Making Parallel Programs Reliable with Stable Multithreading
  Junfeng Yang, Heming Cui, Jingyue Wu, Yang Tang, Gang Hu
  Communications of the ACM (2014)
  

  Describes our vision of stable multithreading, a radically new approach to making multithreading reliable, and summarizes our last five years of work on designing, building, and applying stable multithreading systems.

• Verifying Systems Rules Using Rule-Directed Symbolic Execution [pdf | slides]
  Heming Cui, Gang Hu, Jingyue Wu, Junfeng Yang
  Eighteenth International Conference on Architecture Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '13), 2013
  

  Describes WOODPECKER, a system that leverages path slicing to speed up symbolic execution. It enables users to check systems rules, and avoids checking program paths irrelevant to the rule, drastically reducing the amount of redundant work.

• Sound and Precise Analysis of Parallel Programs through Schedule Specialization [pdf]
  Jingyue Wu, Yang Tang, Gang Hu, Heming Cui, Junfeng Yang
  Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '12), 2012
  

  Describes a program analysis framework for analyzing multithreaded programs with high precision. The key idea is to statically analyze a multithreaded program toward only a small set of schedules to improve precision, then enforce these schedules at runtime for soundness.

• Efficient Deterministic Multithreading through Schedule Relaxation [abstract | pdf | slides]
  Heming Cui, Jingyue Wu, John Gallagher, Huayang Guo, Junfeng Yang
  Proceedings of 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '11), 2011
  

  Describes PEREGRINE, a system for efficiently making threads deterministic, addressing a key open challenge within the field of deterministic execution.

• Stable Deterministic Multithreading through Schedule Memoization [abstract | pdf | slides]
  Heming Cui, Jingyue Wu, Chia-che Tsai, Junfeng Yang
  Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '10), 2010
  

  Describes TERN, a system for making threads more deterministic and stable. The key idea is to memoize past schedules and reuse them when possible, much like the natural tendencies in animals and humans to repeat familiar routes to avoid possible hazards along unknown routes.

• Bypassing Races in Live Applications with Execution Filters [abstract | pdf]
  Jingyue Wu, Heming Cui, Junfeng Yang
  Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '10), 2010
  

  Describes LOOM, a live-workaround system for fixing races in live applications. LOOM is safe (live-update will not introduce new errors), fast (negligible overhead for most benchmarks), and flexible (able to fix all bugs evaluated).

Projects

TERN

LOOM

DEFENS

GUANYIN

SEMGREP

MINESTRONE

Teaching

TA, RELIABLE SOFTWARE AT FALL 2009, CS@CU. Instructor: Professor Junfeng Yang.

TA, OPERATING SYSTEM AT SPRING 2009, CS@CU. Instructor: Professor Junfeng Yang.

TA, OPERATING SYSTEM AT SPRING 2007, CS@TSINGHUA. Instructor: Professor Yong Xiang.

TA, OPERATING SYSTEM AT SPRING 2006, CS@TSINGHUA. Instructor: Professor Yong Xiang.