High Efficient Memory Race Recording Scheme for Parallel Program Deterministic Replay Under Multi-Core Architecture

Current shared memory multi-core and multiprocessor systems are nondeterministic. When these systems execute a multithreaded application, even if supplied with the same input, they could produce a different output each time. It frustrates debugging and limits the ability to properly test multithreaded code, and is becoming a major stumbling block to the much-needed widespread adoption of parallel programming. The support for deterministic replay of multithreaded execution is greatly helpful in finding concurrency bugs. A memory race recording scheme, named Rainbow, is proposed. Its core idea is to make inter-thread communications fully deterministic. The unique feature of Rainbow is that it precisely sets up happens-before relationships between conflicting memory operations among different threads. By using effective, bloom-filter based, coherence history queue, Rainbow removes redundant happens-before relations implied in the already generated log and enables a compact log. Rainbow adds the modest hardware to the base multi-core processors, and the coherence protocol is unmodified. The analysis results show that Rainbow reduces the log size by 17% of a state-of-the-art scheme, and the records execution speed is similar to that of release consistency (RC) execution and replays at about 93% of its speed. The determinism can be provided with little performance cost using our architecture proposals on the state-of-the-art hardware, and the software-only approaches can be utilized on existing systems without problem.