Detecting and tolerating asymmetric races

Because data races represent a hard-to-manage class of errors in concurrent programs, numerous approaches to detect them have been proposed and evaluated. We specifically consider asymmetric races, a subclass of all race conditions, where a programmer's thread correctly acquires and releases a lock for a given variable, while another thread causes a race by improperly accessing this variable. We introduce ToleRace, a runtime system that allows programs to either tolerate or detect asymmetric races based on local replication of shared state. ToleRace provides an approximation of atomicity in critical sections by creating local copies of shared variables when a critical section is entered and propagating the appropriate copy when the critical section is exited. We characterize the possible interleavings that can cause races and precisely describe the effect of ToleRace in each case. We study the theoretical aspects of an oracle that knows exactly what type of interleaving has occur...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Paruj Ratanaworabhan, Martin Burtscher, Darko Kirovski, Benjamin G. Zorn, Rahul Nagpal, Karthik Pattabiraman
• Keywords: Asymmetric Races, Critical Section, Dynamic Instrumentation Tool, Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2009