Resource usage analysis and its application to resource certification

Abstract. Resource usage is one of the most important characteristics of programs. Automatically generated information about resource usage can be used in multiple ways, both during program development and deployment. In this paper we discuss and present examples on how such information is obtained in COSTA, a state of the art static analysis sys-tem. COSTA obtains safe symbolic upper bounds on the resource usage of a large class of general-purpose programs written in a mainstream pro-gramming language such as Java (bytecode). We also discuss the appli-cation of resource-usage information for code certification, whereby code not guaranteed to run within certain user-specified bounds is rejected.