Chimera: hybrid program analysis for determinism

Chimera1 uses a new hybrid program analysis to provide deterministic replay for commodity multiprocessor systems. Chimera leverages the insight that it is easy to provide deterministic multiprocessor replay for data-race-free programs (one can just record nondeterministic inputs and the order of synchronization operations), so if we can somehow transform an arbitrary program to be datarace-free, then we can provide deterministic replay cheaply for that program. To perform this transformation, Chimera uses a sound static data-race detector to find all potential data-races. It then instruments pairs of potentially racing instructions with a weak-lock, which provides sufficient guarantees to allow deterministic replay but does not guarantee mutual exclusion. Unsurprisingly, a large fraction of data-races found by the static tool are false data-races, and instrumenting them each of them with a weak-lock results in prohibitively high overhead. Chimera dras

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Dongyoon Lee, Peter M. Chen, Jason Flinn, Satish Narayanasamy
• Keywords: Arbitrary Program, Hybrid Program, PLDI 2012, Programming Languages, Synchronization Operations