by Angela Guess

A new press release out of Thinking Software asks, “What if people never again had to worry about software applications generating unreliable results? A new product and service, Race Catcher™ by Thinking Software, leaves this task behind and lets applications analyze themselves. Race Catcher™ is both a product and a service that allows software applications to analyze themselves. This new paradigm is constructed by the following components: (1) Automatic self-configuration of virtual machines that are able to:  create a knowledge about the reliability of the applications they run; communicate this knowledge to a knowledge aggregation device; securely publish this knowledge to subscribing machines within their private network. (2) Self-created network of ‘reliability conscious machines’ (much like social networks, where the effect is amplified by the number of members) where the members are machines having common interests – running the same applications; (3) Modeling software providing for automated program understanding – effectively explaining analyzed issues to programmers.”

The release continues, “A computer program is a complex apparatus. In addition, today’s computing is predominantly multithreaded. That is inescapable in order to utilize growing processing power and speed of today’s multicore machines. The most complex and most time consuming programming issues are related to multithreading and specifically to a well known in the field issue of ‘race condition’ – an intermittent condition of unpredictable result – the one that is present in many production applications, and the one that, not unlike a traditional virus, stays there dormant and awaits for a specific condition to act. Even worse thing about race conditions is, that they are silent. Often they will not bring the system down, and will repeat unspecified number of times, causing the software user to trust application’s results, when such trust is unwarranted.”

Read more at PR Web.

Photo credit: Thinking Software