USENIX 2nd Symposium on
OS Design and Implementation (OSDI '96)
Online Data-Race Detection via Coherency Guarantees
Dejan Perkovic and
Peter J. Keleher
University of Maryland
Abstract
We present the design and evaluation of an on-the-fly data-race-detection
technique that handles applications written for the lazy release consistent
(LRC) shared memory model.
We require no explicit association between synchronization and shared
memory. Hence, shared accesses have to be tracked and compared at the
minimum granularity of data accesses, which is typically a single word.
The novel aspect of this system is that we are able to leverage information
used to support the underlying memory abstraction to perform on-the-fly
data-race detection, without compiler support. Our system consists of a
minimally modified version of the CVM distributed shared memory system, and
instrumentation code inserted by the ATOM code re-writer.
We present an experimental evaluation of our technique by using our system
to look for data races in four unaltered programs. Our system correctly
found read-write data races in a program that allows unsynchronized read
access to a global tour bound, and a write-write race in a program from a
standard benchmark suite. Overall, our mechanism reduced program
performance by approximately a factor of two.
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