HARD: Hardware-Assisted Lockset-based Race Detection

The emergence of multicore architectures will lead to an increase in the use of multithreaded applications that are prone to synchronization bugs, such as data races. Software solutions for detecting data races generally incur large overheads. Hardware support for race detection can significantly reduce that overhead. However, all existing hardware proposals for race detection are based on the happensbefore algorithm which is sensitive to thread interleaving and cannot detect races that are not exposed during the monitored run. The lockset algorithm addresses this limitation. Unfortunately, due to the challenging issues such as storing the lockset information and performing complex set operations, so far it has been implemented only in software with 10-30 times performance hit. This paper proposes the first hardware implementation (called HARD) of the lockset algorithm to exploit the race detection capability of this algorithm with minimal overhead. HARD efficiently stores lock sets i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Pin Zhou, Radu Teodorescu, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, Hardware Bloom Filters, HPCA 2007, Race Detection, Race Detection Capability