PHALANX: Parallel Checking of Expressive Heap Assertions

Unrestricted use of heap pointers makes software systems difficult to understand and to debug. To address this challenge, the authors developed PHALANX - a practical framework for dynamically checking expressive heap properties such as ownership, sharing and reachability. PHALANX uses novel parallel algorithms to efficiently check a wide range of heap properties utilizing the available cores. PHALANX run-time is implemented on top of IBM's Java production virtual machine. This has enabled one to apply their new techniques to real world software.