Practical static race detection for Java parallel loops

  • Authors:

  • Cosmin Radoi;Danny Dig

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Illinois, USA;Oregon State University, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Despite significant progress in recent years, the important problem of static race detection remains open. Previous techniques took a general approach and looked for races by analyzing the effects induced by low-level concurrency constructs (e.g., java.lang.Thread). But constructs and libraries for expressing parallelism at a higher level (e.g., fork-join, futures, parallel loops) are becoming available in all major programming languages. We claim that specializing an analysis to take advantage of the extra semantic information provided by the use of these constructs and libraries improves precision and scalability. We present IteRace, a set of techniques that are specialized to use the intrinsic thread, safety, and data-flow structure of collections and of the new loop-parallelism mechanism to be introduced in Java 8. Our evaluation shows that IteRace is fast and precise enough to be practical. It scales to programs of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it reports few race warnings, thus avoiding a common pitfall of static analyses. The tool revealed six bugs in real-world applications. We reported four of them, one had already been fixed, and three were new and the developers confirmed and fixed them.