Timetraveler: exploiting acyclic races for optimizing memory race recording

• Authors: Gwendolyn Voskuilen;Faraz Ahmad;T. N. Vijaykumar
• Venue: Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
• Year: 2010

As chip multiprocessors emerge as the prevalent microprocessor architecture, support for debugging shared-memory parallel programs becomes important. A key difficulty is the programs' nondeterministic semantics due to which replay runs of a buggy program may not reproduce the bug. The non-determinism stems from memory races where accesses from two threads, at least one of which is a write, go to the same memory location. Previous hardware schemes for memory race recording log the predecessor-successor thread ordering at memory races and enforce the same orderings in the replay run to achieve deterministic replay. To reduce the log size, the schemes exploit transitivity in the orderings to avoid recording redundant orderings. To reduce the log size further while requiring minimal hardware, we propose Timetraveler which for the first time exploits acyclicity of races based on the key observation that an acyclic race need not be recorded even if the race is not covered already by transitivity. Timetraveler employs a novel and elegant mechanism called post-dating which both ensures that acyclic races, including those through the L2, are eventually ordered correctly, and identifies cyclic races. To address false cycles through the L2, Timetraveler employs another novel mechanism called time-delay buffer which delays the advancement of the L2 banks' timestamps and thereby reduces the false cycles. Using simulations, we show that Timetraveler reduces the log size for commercial workloads by 88% over the best previous approach while using only a 696-byte time-delay buffer.