ORCA: Ordering-free Regions for Consistency and Atomicity

Writing correct synchronization is one of the main difficulties of multithreaded programming. Incorrect synchronization causes many subtle concurrency errors such as data races and atomicity violations. Previous work has proposed stronger memory consistency models to rule out certain classes of concurrency bugs. However, these approaches are limited by a program’s original (and possibly incorrect) synchronization. In this work, we provide stronger guarantees than previous memory consistency models by punctuating atomicity only at ordering constructs like barriers, but not at lock operations. We describe the Ordering-free Regions for Consistency and Atomicity (ORCA) system which enforces atomicity at the granularity of ordering-free regions (OFRs). While many atomicity violations occur at finer granularity, in an empirical study of many large multithreaded workloads we find no examples of code that requires atomicity coarser than OFRs. Thus, we believe OFRs are a conservative approximation of the atomicity requirements of many programs. ORCA assists programmers by throwing an exception when OFR atomicity is threatened, and, in exception-free executions, guaranteeing that all OFRs execute atomically. In our evaluation, we show that ORCA automatically prevents real concurrency bugs. A user-study of ORCA demonstrates that synchronizing a program with ORCA is easier than using a data race detector. We evaluate modest hardware support that allows ORCA to run with just 18% slowdown on average over pthreads, with very similar scalability

Sound Atomicity Inference for Data-Centric Synchronization

Data-Centric Concurrency Control (DCCC) shifts the reasoning about concurrency restrictions from control structures to data declaration. It is a high-level declarative approach that abstracts away from the actual concurrency control mechanism(s) in use. Despite its advantages, the practical use of DCCC is hindered by the fact that it may require many annotations and/or multiple implementations of the same method to cope with differently qualified parameters. Moreover, the existing DCCC solutions do not address the use of interfaces, precluding their use in most object-oriented programs. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we present AtomiS, a new DCCC model based on a rigorously defined type-sound programming language. Programming with AtomiS requires only (atomic)-qualifying types of parameters and return values in interface definitions, and of fields in class definitions. From this atomicity specification, a static analysis infers the atomicity constraints that are local to each method, considering valid only the method variants that are consistent with the specification, and performs code generation for all valid variants of each method. The generated code is then the target for automatic injection of concurrency control primitives, by means of the desired automatic technique and associated atomicity and deadlock-freedom guarantees, which can be plugged-into the model's pipeline. We present the foundations for the AtomiS analysis and synthesis, with formal guarantees that the generated program is well-typed and that it corresponds behaviourally to the original one. The proofs are mechanised in Coq. We also provide a Java implementation that showcases the applicability of AtomiS in real-life programs

Panini: a concurrent programming model for solving pervasive and oblivious interference

Modular reasoning about concurrent programs is complicated by the possibility of interferences happening between any two instructions of a task (pervasive interference), and these interferences not giving out any information about the behaviors of potentially interfering concurrent tasks (oblivious interference). Reasoning about a concurrent program would be easier if a programmer modularly and statically (1) knows precisely the program points at which interferences may happen (sparse interference), and (2) has some insights into behaviors of potentially interfering tasks at these points (cognizant interference). In this work we present Panini, a core concurrent calculus which guarantees sparse interference, by controlling sharing among concurrent tasks, and cognizant interference, by controlling dynamic name bindings and accessibility of states of tasks. Panini promotes capsule-oriented programming whose concurrently running capsules own their states, communicate by asynchronous invocations of their procedures and dynamically transfer ownership. Panini limits sharing among two capsules to other capsules and futures, limits accessibility of a capsule states to only through its procedures and dispatches a procedure invocation on the static type of its receiver capsule. We formalize Panini, present its semantics and illustrate how its interference model, using behavioral contracts, enables Hoare-style modular reasoning about concurrent programs with interference

A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated citation

STM: Lock-Free Synchronization

Current parallel programming uses low-level programming constructs like threads and explicit synchronization (for example, locks, semaphores and monitors) to coordinate thread execution which makes these programs difficult to design, program and debug. In this paper we present Software Transactional Memory (STM) which is a promising new approach for programming in parallel processors having shared memory. It is a concurrency control mechanism that is widely considered to be easier to use by programmers than other mechanisms such as locking. It allows portions of a program to execute in isolation, without regard to other, concurrently executing tasks. A programmer can reason about the correctness of code within a transaction and need not worry about complex interactions with other, concurrently executing parts of the program

Strong Memory Consistency For Parallel Programming

Correctly synchronizing multithreaded programs is challenging, and errors can lead to program failures (e.g., atomicity violations). Existing memory consistency models rule out some possible failures, but are limited by depending on subtle programmer-defined locking code and by providing unintuitive semantics for incorrectly synchronized code. Stronger memory consistency models assist programmers by providing them with easier-to-understand semantics with regard to memory access interleavings in parallel code. This dissertation proposes a new strong memory consistency model based on ordering-free regions (OFRs), which are spans of dynamic instructions between consecutive ordering constructs (e.g. barriers). Atomicity over ordering-free regions provides stronger atomicity than existing strong memory consistency models with competitive performance. Ordering-free regions also simplify programmer reasoning by limiting the potential for atomicity violations to fewer points in the program’s execution. This dissertation explores both software-only and hardware-supported systems that provide OFR serializability