A Virtual Memory Foundation for Scalable Deterministic Parallelism

Recentdeterministicexecutionenvironmentspromiseefficientprogram replay and bug reproduction, but their scalability is currently limitedbystrictlyhierarchicalsynchronizationmodelsorserialized thread scheduling mechanisms. To address these issues, we introduce a single-producer multiple-consumer (SPMC) virtual memory foundation for deterministic parallelism, which supports nonhierarchical synchronization without serialized thread scheduling. An extension to the Determinator microkernel, supporting SPMC memory regions, offers threads and processes scalable “peer-topeer” communication while preserving the kernel’s existing guaranteeofsystem-enforceddeterminism. DetMP,adeterministicuserlevel message passing API modeled on MPI, illustrates one way tobuildconvenientapplication-levelparallelprogrammingabstractions atop the SPMC foundation. Preliminary results suggest that DetMP atop SPMC may be realistic and useful, achieving nearideal speedup for parallel matrix multiplication, and good scaling forIS,inall cases ensuringstrictdeterminism. Categories andSubjectDescriptors D.4.1[ProcessManagement]: Multiprocessing/multiprogramming