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Race Detection Techniques

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing

Synonyms

Anomaly detection

Definition

Race detection is the procedure of identifying race conditions in parallel programs and program executions. Unintended race conditions are a common source of error in parallel programs and hence race detection methods play an important role in debugging such errors.

Discussion

Introduction

The following paragraphs summarize the notion of race conditions and data races. An elaborate discussion and detailed definitions are given in the corresponding related entry on “ race conditions.”

Race conditions. A widely accepted definition of race conditions is given by Netzer and Miller [47]: A general race, or race for short, is a pair of conflicting accesses to a shared resource for which the order of accesses is not guaranteed by the program, i.e., the accesses may execute in either order or simultaneously. A subclass of general races are data races, for which conflicting memory accesses may occur simultaneously.

Data races. The bulk of literature on race...

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences, Kesslerplatz 12, 90489, Nuremberg, Germany

    Christoph von Praun

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  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    David Padua

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von Praun, C. (2011). Race Detection Techniques. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_38

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