Light64

Abstract

Developing and testing parallel code is hard. Even for one given input, a parallel program can have many possible different thread interleavings, which are hard for the programmer to foresee and for a testing tool to cover using stress or random testing. For this reason, a recent trend is to use Systematic Testing, which methodically explores different thread interleavings, while checking for various bugs. Data races are common bugs but, unfortunately, checking for races is often skipped in systematic testers because it introduces substantial runtime overhead if done purely in software. Recently, several techniques for race detection in hardware have been proposed, but they still require significant hardware support.