Record/Replay (RR) allows developers to record an execution and then replay it exactly as it was recorded. RR enables deterministic replay of non-deterministic behaviors in a different environment than the one used for the recording, which can capture complex bugs in production and find the root cause during development. Unfortunately, support for RR still introduces a non-negligible amount of performance overhead, which limits its applicability. Two main sources of such overhead in state-of-the-art RR systems are: multi-threading, and I/O bound workloads. To ensure high-fidelity when replaying multi-threading execution, recordings either capture the total order of events, which the replayer then enforces, or capture a partial order that requires further processing before replay. Recording also effectively doubles the I/O performed as the recorder needs to perform the original I/O and then record it to a log. Such increased I/O severely limits the performance of I/O dominated workloads. In this paper, we present two complimentary techniques to reduce the overhead of RR. First, we introduce Relaxed Total Order (RTO), an online-computable weakening of total order that preserves the cross-thread constraints needed for replay while avoiding unnecessary serialization. We design RTO to be compatible with Multi-Version eXecution (MVX), enabling online deterministic replay without pre-processing the recording log or heavyweight coordination. We formalize RTO’s strictness and correctness, showing that it is a novel point between partial- and total-order. Our prototype implementation on top of an existing state-of-the-art RR system reduces recording overhead from 21.0% to 15.3% and halves replay overhead from 67.5% to 31.7%. Second, we combine RR with Multi-Version eXecution (MVX) to eliminate RR’s poor performance on I/O-bound workloads. Our hybrid design uses a follower variant to absorb the extra I/O needed for logging, and to backfill as much I/O as possible from the same underlying system, keeping the user-facing leader off the critical path. Our prototype reduces the overhead required to record I/O bound programs from 192.5% to just 25.5%, without penalizing other more common workloads. Together, RTO and hybrid MVX/RR substantially narrow the gap between today’s RR systems and practical, low-overhead, always-on deployment.

Multi-version execution (MVX) is a technique that deploys many equivalent versions of the same program — variants — as a single program, with direct application in important fields such as: security, reliability, analysis, and availability. MVX can be seen as “online Record/Replay (RR)”, as RR captures a program’s execution as a log stored on disk that can later be replayed to observe the same execution. Unfortunately, current MVX techniques target programs written in C/C++ and do not support programs written in managed languages, which are the vast majority of code written nowadays. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Jmvx— a novel system for performing MVX and RR on programs written in managed languages. Jmvx supports programs written in Java by intercepting automatically identified non-deterministic methods, via a novel dynamic analysis technique, and ensuring that all variants execute the same methods and obtain the same data. Jmvx supports multi-threaded programs, by capturing synchronization operations in one variant, and ensuring all other variants follow the same ordering. We validated that Jmvx supports MVX and RR by applying it to a suite of benchmarks representative of programs written in Java. Internally, Jmvx uses a circular buffer located in shared memory between JVMs to enable fast communication between all variants, averaging 5% |47% performance overhead when performing MVX with multithreading support disabled|enabled, 8% |25% when recording, and 13% |73% when replaying.

Image co-registration is an early step in SAR image processing. The quality of the image resampling affects the rest of the processing chain. Various interpolation methods exist, among them the kriging approach that requires the estimation of the spatial variation of the image called variogram. We propose to enhance the estimation of the variogram, especially at small shift values, by introducing the multi-temporal variogram which exploits the temporal series and we apply it to Sentinel-1 acquisitions.

Digital doppelgangers are virtual humans that highly resemble the real self but behave independently. Digital doppelgangers possess great potential to serve as powerful models for behavioral change. An emerging technology, the Rapid Avatar Capture and Simulation (RACAS) system, enables low-cost and high-speed scanning of a human user and creation of a digital doppelganger that is a fully animatable virtual 3D model of the user. We designed a virtual role-playing game, DELTA, that implements a powerful cognitive dissonance-based paradigm for attitudinal and behavioral change, and integrated it with digital doppelgangers to influence a human user's attitude towards sexism on college campuses. In this paper, we discuss the design and evaluation the RACAS system and the DELTA game-based environment. Results indicate the potential impact of the DELTA game-based environment in creating an immersive virtual experience for attitudinal change.

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