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An Efficient and Flexible Deterministic Framework for Multithreaded Programs

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Abstract

Determinism is very useful to multithreaded programs in debugging, testing, etc. Many deterministic approaches have been proposed, such as deterministic multithreading (DMT) and deterministic replay. However, these systems either are inefficient or target a single purpose, which is not flexible. In this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible deterministic framework for multithreaded programs. Our framework implements determinism in two steps: relaxed determinism and strong determinism. Relaxed determinism solves data races efficiently by using a proper weak memory consistency model. After that, we implement strong determinism by solving lock contentions deterministically. Since we can apply different approaches for these two steps independently, our framework provides a spectrum of deterministic choices, including nondeterministic system (fast), weak deterministic system (fast and conditionally deterministic), DMT system, and deterministic replay system. Our evaluation shows that the DMT configuration of this framework could even outperform a state-of-the-art DMT system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Kai Lu, Xiao-Ping Wang & Chen Chen

  2. College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Kai Lu, Xu Zhou, Xiao-Ping Wang & Chen Chen

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195-2350, U.S.A

    Tom Bergan

Authors
  1. Kai Lu
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  2. Xu Zhou
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  3. Xiao-Ping Wang
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  4. Tom Bergan
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  5. Chen Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kai Lu.

Additional information

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61272142, 61103082, 61402492, 61170261, 61103193, the National High Technology Research and Development 863 Program of China under Grant Nos. 2012AA01A301, 2012AA010901, and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of China.

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Lu, K., Zhou, X., Wang, XP. et al. An Efficient and Flexible Deterministic Framework for Multithreaded Programs. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 30, 42–56 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1503-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1503-8

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