Demand-Driven Software Race Detection using Hardware Performance Counters

Ramesh Peri (Intel)

ABSTRACT

Dynamic data race detectors are an important mechanism for creating robust parallel programs. Software race detectors instrument the program under test, observe each memory access, and watch for inter-thread data sharing that could lead to concurrency errors. While this method of bug hunting can find races that are normally difficult to observe, it also suffers from high runtime overheads. It is not uncommon for commercial race detectors to experience 300× slowdowns, limiting their usage.

This talk presents a hardware-assisted demand-driven race detector (the paper was originally published at ISCA 2011). We are able to observe cache events that are indicative of data sharing between threads by taking advantage of hardware available on modern commercial microprocessors. We use these to build a race detector that is only enabled when it is likely that inter-thread data sharing is occurring. When little sharing takes place, this demand-driven analysis is much faster than contemporary continuous-analysis tools without a large loss of detection accuracy. We modified the race detector in Intel Inspector XE to utilize our hardware-based sharing indicator and were able to achieve performance increases of 3× and 10× in two parallel benchmark suites and 51× for one particular program.