Deterministic parallel random-number generation for dynamic-multithreading platforms

Existing concurrency platforms for dynamic multithreading do not provide repeatable parallel random-number generators. This paper proposes that a mechanism called pedigrees be built into the runtime system to enable efficient deterministic parallel randomnumber generation. Experiments with the open-source MIT Cilk runtime system show that the overhead for maintaining pedigrees is negligible. Specifically, on a suite of 10 benchmarks, the relative overhead of Cilk with pedigrees to the original Cilk has a geometric mean of less than 1%. We persuaded Intel to modify its commercial C/C++ compiler, which provides the Cilk Plus concurrency platform, to include pedigrees, and we built a library implementation of a deterministic parallel random-number generator called DOTMIX that compresses the pedigree and then “RC6-mixes” the result. The statistical quality of DOTMIX is comparable to that of the popular Mersenne twister, but somewhat slower than a nondeterministic parallel version of...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Charles E. Leiserson, Tao B. Schardl, Jim Sukha
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Maximal Independent Set, Mersenne Twister, PPOPP 2012, Random Number Generators