research-article

Position paper: nondeterminism is unavoidable, but data races are pure evil

Author:

Hans-J. BoehmAuthors Info & Claims

RACES '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Relaxing synchronization for multicore and manycore scalability

Pages 9 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/2414729.2414732

Published: 21 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Modern mainstream programming languages distinguish between "atomic" (or sometimes "volatile") variables, and ordinary data. Atomic accesses are treated as synchronization constructs, and support concurrent access with well-defined semantics. In contrast, concurrent accesses to ordinary data, if at least one access is an update, constitute a data race. Code with data races does not have well-defined semantics. Such code may fail completely when recompiled or run on a different operating system version. In C and C++ data races are equivalent to assignments to out-of-bounds array elements; any data race can result in arbitrary failures, including application crashes, hangs, and inexplicably and completely wrong answers.

These language specifications, combined with implementation realities, make it unsafe to exploit "benign" data races to obtain performance, even if we are willing to tolerate approximate answers. Furthermore, even if we happen to get lucky, and code with data races happens to execute correctly with our current compiler, data races provide at best inconsequential performance advantages over atomics. In fact, there are interesting, and probably common, cases in which data races provide only a minor performance advantage, even over pervasive locking to avoid them, it at sufficiently large core counts. We demonstrate such a case.

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Cited By

Shi ZMathur UPavlogiannis ARoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Optimistic Prediction of Synchronization-Reversal Data RacesProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639099(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639099
Liu LMillstein TMusuvathi M(2021)Safe-by-default Concurrency for Modern Programming LanguagesACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/346220643:3(1-50)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3462206
Mathur UPavlogiannis AViswanathan M(2021)Optimal prediction of synchronization-preserving racesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34343175:POPL(1-29)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3434317
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Index Terms

Position paper: nondeterminism is unavoidable, but data races are pure evil
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Parallel computing methodologies
    1. Parallel programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Parallel programming languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

RACES '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Relaxing synchronization for multicore and manycore scalability

October 2012

74 pages

ISBN:9781450316323

DOI:10.1145/2414729

Program Chairs:
Andrew P. Black
Portland State University, United States
,
Theo D'Hondt
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
,
Doug Kimelman
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, United States
,
Martin Rinard
MIT CSAIL, United States
,
David Ungar
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, United States

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

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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Publication History

Published: 21 October 2012

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SIGPLAN

SPLASH '12: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 21, 2012

Arizona, Tucson, USA

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Cited By

Shi ZMathur UPavlogiannis ARoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Optimistic Prediction of Synchronization-Reversal Data RacesProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639099(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639099
Liu LMillstein TMusuvathi M(2021)Safe-by-default Concurrency for Modern Programming LanguagesACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/346220643:3(1-50)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3462206
Mathur UPavlogiannis AViswanathan M(2021)Optimal prediction of synchronization-preserving racesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34343175:POPL(1-29)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3434317
Mathur UPavlogiannis AViswanathan MHermanns HZhang LKobayashi NMiller D(2020)The Complexity of Dynamic Data Race PredictionProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science10.1145/3373718.3394783(713-727)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373718.3394783
Genç KRoemer JXu YBond M(2019)Dependence-aware, unbounded sound predictive race detectionProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33606053:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360605
Roemer JGenç KBond M(2018)High-coverage, unbounded sound predictive race detectionACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296979.319238553:4(374-389)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296979.3192385
Roemer JGenç KBond MFoster JGrossman D(2018)High-coverage, unbounded sound predictive race detectionProceedings of the 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3192366.3192385(374-389)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3192366.3192385
Barker A(2018)An academic's observations from a sabbatical at GoogleCommunications of the ACM10.1145/317774861:9(31-33)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2018
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Afanasov MMottola LGhezzi C(2018)Software Adaptation in Wireless Sensor NetworksACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems10.1145/314545312:4(1-29)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2018
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Amin NRompf T(2017)Collapsing towers of interpretersProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31581402:POPL(1-33)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2017
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