Refactoring java programs using concurrent libraries

Abstract

Multithread programming is becoming ever-more important to exploit the capabilities of multicore processors. Versions of Java prior to version 5 provide only the synchronized construct as a consistency primitive, which causes a performance scalability problem for multicore machines. Therefore, Java 5 added the java.util.concurrent package to reduce lock contention. Programmers must manually rewrite their existing code to use this package in existing programs. There are two typical rewritings methods. One is to replace an operation on a variable within a synchronized block with an atomic-lock-free version. The other is to replace a sequential concurrent class with its concurrent version. The conventional rewriting approach has three deficiencies. One problem is transformations that may change the behavior of a program. The second problem is missed modifications to be rewritten. The third problem is two difference writing techniques are applied individually to each code fragment even in the same method. This paper describes our refactoring algorithms that address these three problems as they rewrite Java code for scalable performance. We use inter-procedural pointer analysis and consistency tests among the candidate code fragments. Copyright 2011 ACM.