Abstract
Data races or races which occur in parallel programs such as OpenMP programs must be detected, because they may lead to unpredictable results of program executions. There are three representative tools which detect races which can occur in OpenMP programs: Thread Analyzer of Sun Inc., Thread Checker of Intel Corporation, and RaceStand of GNU. Two of these tools, Thread Checker and RaceStand, are known with their power for race detection through empirical analysis. But Thread Analyzer has not been analyzed empirically about its power for race detection and we cannot know exactly its race verification capability as well as its efficiency. This paper empirically analyzes the verification capability of Thread Analyzer using a set of synthetic programs which has nested parallelism or inter-thread coordination, and compares three race detection tools in an aspect of efficiency through OpenMP Micro-benchmarks of EPCC that measures loop scheduling and array operations. We predicted that Thread Analyzer verifies the existence of races in most OpenMP programs. And we found that Thread Analyzer is faster than Thread Checker about 5 times and 2 times slower than RaceStand in arraybench of EPCC. Also, it shows similar time variation with Thread Checker and is about 20 times slower than RaceStand in schedbench of EPCC.
“This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the IITA (Institute for Information Technology Advancement)” (IITA-2009-C1090-0904-0001).
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Ha, OK., Kim, YJ., Kang, MH., Jun, YK. (2009). Empirical Comparison of Race Detection Tools for OpenMP Programs. In: Ślęzak, D., Kim, Th., Yau, S.S., Gervasi, O., Kang, BH. (eds) Grid and Distributed Computing. GDC 2009. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 63. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10549-4_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10549-4_13
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