OptDebug: Fault-Inducing Operation Isolation for Dataflow Applications (SoCC 2021)
Fault-isolation is extremely challenging in large scale data processing in cloud environments. Data provenance is a dominant existing approach to isolate data records responsible for a given output. However, data provenance concerns fault isolation only in the data-space, as opposed to fault isolation in the code-space—how can we precisely localize operations or APIs responsible for a given suspicious or incorrect result?
OptDebug identifies fault-inducing operations in a dataflow application using three insights. First, debugging is easier with a small-scale input than a large-scale input. So it uses data provenance to simplify the original in- put records to a smaller set leading to test failures and test successes. Second, keeping track of operation provenance is crucial for debugging. Thus, it leverages automated taint anal- ysis to propagate the lineage of operations downstream with individual records. Lastly, each operation may contribute to test failures to a different degree. Thus OptDebug ranks each operation’s spectra—the relative participation frequency in failing vs. passing tests. In our experiments, OptDebug achieves 100% recall and 86% precision in terms of detecting faulty operations and reduces the debugging time by 17× compared to a naïve approach. Overall, OptDebug shows great promise in improving developer productivity in today’s complex data processing pipelines by obviating the need to re-execute the program repetitively with different inputs and manually examine program traces to isolate buggy code.
This project is led by Professor Muhammad Ali Gulzar at Virginia Tech.
Muhammad Ali Gulzar: Professor at Virginia Tech, gulzar@cs.vt.edu; Prof Kim's former PhD student at UCLA
Miryung Kim: Professor at UCLA, miryung@cs.ucla.edu;
For more information please visit this GitHub repository at Virginia Tech.
Please refer to our SoCC 2021 paper, OptDebug: Fault-Inducing Operation Isolation for Dataflow Applications for more details.