Coverity reveals multithreaded development tool

It points, as an example, to the North American blackout of 2003, which it says was due to a race condition that occurred after 3 million hours of consecutive system operation.

The company says that Coverity Thread Analyzer also reduces the risk when migrating complex, single-threaded code bases into multicore environments. It does this via reporting thread-shared data to users, indicating locations where a locking discipline should be introduced. This allows developers to proactively identify existing and potential concurrency issues, so they can eliminate them before they cause failures in the field.

"As the demand for multithreaded Java applications continues to accelerate, software developers are now faced with the pressure to deliver significantly more complex products, often on the same tight timelines as the single-threaded products that preceded them," said Coverity CTO Ben Chelf in a statement.

Coverity Thread Analyzer is a stand-alone product that runs on Linux, Solaris Sparc, Solaris X86, Windows XP and Server 2003, and Mac OS X. It supports Sun JDK 1.5, IBM's 1.5 JVM and BEA Jrockit 5.

Coverity did not respond at the time of writing to an interview request, and there is no immediate word on pricing.