Deterministic multithreading (DMT) eliminates many pernicious software problems caused by nondeterminism. It works by constraining a program to repeat the same thread interleavings, or schedules, when given same input. Despite much recent research, it remains an open challenge to build both deterministic and efficient DMT systems for general programs on commodity hardware. To deterministically resolve a data race, a DMT system must enforce a deterministic schedule of shared memory accesses, or mem-schedule, which can incur prohibitive overhead. By using schedules consisting only of synchronization operations, or sync-schedule, this overhead can be avoided. However, a sync-schedule is deterministic only for race-free programs, but most programs have races.

Implementation-level software model checking explores the state space of a system implementation directly to find potential software defects without requiring any specification or modeling. Despite early successes, the effectiveness of this approach remains severely constrained due to poor scalability caused by state-space explosion. DeMeter makes software model checking more practical with the following contributions: (i) proposing dynamic interface reduction, a new state-space reduction technique, (ii) introducing a framework that enables dynamic interface reduction in an existing model checker with a reasonable amount of effort, and (iii) providing the framework with a distributed runtime engine that supports parallel distributed model checking.

A replay tool aiming to reproduce a program's execution interposes itself at an appropriate replay interface between the program and the environment. During recording, it logs all non-deterministic side effects passing through the interface from the environment and feeds them back during replay. The replay interface is critical for correctness and recording overhead of replay tools.