Kendo: efficient deterministic multithreading in software

Although chip-multiprocessors have become the industry standard, developing parallel applications that target them remains a daunting task. Non-determinism, inherent in threaded applications, causes significant challenges for parallel programmers by hindering their ability to create parallel applications with repeatable results. As a consequence, parallel applications are significantly harder to debug, test, and maintain than sequential programs. This paper introduces Kendo: a new software-only system that provides deterministic multithreading of parallel applications. Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each thread using performance counters to construct a deterministic logical time that is used to compute an interleaving of shared data accesses that is both deterministic and provides good load balan...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Marek Olszewski, Jason Ansel, Saman P. Amarasinghe
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2009, Deterministic Scheduling Algorithm, Parallel Applications, Program Parallel Applications, Programming Languages