Detecting the first races in parallel programs with ordered synchronization

Abstract

Detecting races is important for debugging shared memory parallel programs, because the races result in unintended nondeterministic executions of the programs. Previous on-the-fly techniques to detect races in programs with inter thread coordination such as ordered synchronization cannot guarantee that the race detected first is not preceded by events that also participate in a race. The paper presents a novel two pass on-the-fly algorithm to detect the first races in such parallel programs. Detecting the first races is important in debugging, because the removal of such races may make other races disappear including those detected first by the previous techniques. Therefore, this technique makes on-the-fly race detection more effective and practical in debugging parallel programs.