research-article

Extended sequential reasoning for data-race-free programs

Authors:

Laura Effinger-Dean,

Hans-J. Boehm,

Dhruva Chakrabarti,

Pramod JoishaAuthors Info & Claims

MSPC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness

Pages 22 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/1988915.1988922

Published: 05 June 2011 Publication History

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Abstract

Most multithreaded programming languages prohibit or discourage data races. By avoiding data races, we are guaranteed that variables accessed within a synchronization-free code region cannot be modified by other threads, allowing us to reason about such code regions as though they were single-threaded. However, such single-threaded reasoning is not limited to synchronization-free regions. We present a simple characterization of extended interference-free regions in which variables cannot be modified by other threads.

This characterization shows that, in the absence of data races, important code analysis problems often have surprisingly easy answers. For instance, we can use local analysis to determine when lock and unlock calls refer to the same mutex. Our characterization can be derived from prior work on safe compiler transformations, but it can also be simply derived from first principles, and justified in a very broad context. In addition, systematic reasoning about overlapping interference-free regions yields insight about optimization opportunities that were not previously apparent.

We give preliminary results for a prototype implementation of interference-free regions in the LLVM compiler infrastructure. We also discuss other potential applications for interference-free regions.

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Cited By

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Banerjee SDevecsery DChen PNarayanasamy S(2020)Sound garbage collection for C using pointer provenanceProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282444:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428244
Jimborean AEkemark PWaern JKaxiras SRos A(2018)Automatic Detection of Large Extended Data-Race-Free Regions with Conflict IsolationIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2017.277150929:3(527-541)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2771509
Jimborean AWaern JEkemark PKaxiras SRos AReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Automatic detection of extended data-race-free regionsProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049835(14-26)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049835
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Index Terms

Extended sequential reasoning for data-race-free programs
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
      1. Semantics
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning
      1. Program analysis
    2. Program semantics

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Information

Published In

MSPC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness

June 2011

74 pages

ISBN:9781450307949

DOI:10.1145/1988915

General Chair:
Jeffrey Vetter
Oak Ridge National Lab and Georgia Institute of Technology
,
Program Chairs:
Madanlal Musuvathi
Microsoft Research
,
Xipeng Shen
College of William & Mary

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 June 2011

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Funding Sources

Division of Graduate Education

Conference

PLDI '11

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

PLDI '11: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 5, 2011

California, San Jose

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6 of 20 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

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Banerjee SDevecsery DChen PNarayanasamy S(2020)Sound garbage collection for C using pointer provenanceProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282444:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428244
Jimborean AEkemark PWaern JKaxiras SRos A(2018)Automatic Detection of Large Extended Data-Race-Free Regions with Conflict IsolationIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2017.277150929:3(527-541)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2771509
Jimborean AWaern JEkemark PKaxiras SRos AReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Automatic detection of extended data-race-free regionsProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049835(14-26)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049835
Rhodes DFlanagan CFreund S(2017)BigFoot: static check placement for dynamic race detectionACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140587.306235052:6(141-156)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140587.3062350
Rhodes DFlanagan CFreund SCohen AVechev M(2017)BigFoot: static check placement for dynamic race detectionProceedings of the 38th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3062341.3062350(141-156)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3062341.3062350
Jimborean AWaern JEkemark PKaxiras SRos A(2017)Automatic detection of extended data-race-free regions2017 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)10.1109/CGO.2017.7863725(14-26)Online publication date: Feb-2017
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Ros AJimborean A(2016)A Hybrid Static-Dynamic Classification for Dual-Consistency Cache CoherenceIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2016.252824127:11(3101-3115)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
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Ros AJimborean A(2015)A Dual-Consistency Cache Coherence ProtocolProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium10.1109/IPDPS.2015.43(1119-1128)Online publication date: 25-May-2015
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Bergan TGrossman DCeze L(2014)Symbolic execution of multithreaded programs from arbitrary program contextsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2714064.266020049:10(491-506)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2014
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Eslamimehr MPalsberg J(2014)Race directed scheduling of concurrent programsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2692916.255526349:8(301-314)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2014
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