Algorithms for data-race detection in multithreaded programs

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-71).by Guang-Ien Cheng.M.Eng

Algorithms for Data-Race Detection in Multithreaded Programs

If two parallel threads access the same location and at least one of them performs a write, a race exists. The detection of races---a major problem in parallel debugging---is complicated by the presence of atomic critical sections. In programs without critical sections, the existence of a race is usually a bug leading to nondeterministic behavior. In programs with critical sections, however, accesses in parallel critical sections are not considered bugs, as the programmer, in specifying the critical sections, presumably intends them to run in parallel. Thus, a race detector should find "data races"---races between accesses not contained in atomic critical sections. We present algorithms for detecting data races in programs written in the Cilk multithreaded language. These algorithms do not verify programs, but rather find data races in all schedulings of the computation generated when a program executes serially on a given input. We present two algorithms for programs in which atomicit..