CoreDet: a compiler and runtime system for deterministic multithreaded execution

The behavior of a multithreaded program does not depend only on its inputs. Scheduling, memory reordering, timing, and low-level hardware effects all introduce nondeterminism in the execution of multithreaded programs. This severely complicates many tasks, including debugging, testing, and automatic replication. In this work, we avoid these complications by eliminating their root cause: we develop a compiler and runtime system that runs arbitrary multithreaded C/C++ POSIX Threads programs deterministically. A trivial non-performant approach to providing determinism is simply deterministically serializing execution. Instead, we present a compiler and runtime infrastructure that ensures determinism but resorts to serialization rarely, for handling interthread communication and synchronization. We develop two basic approaches, both of which are largely dynamic with performance improved by some static compiler optimizations. First, an ownership-based approach detects interthread communica...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Tom Bergan, Owen Anderson, Joseph Devietti, Luis Ceze, Dan Grossman
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2010, Compiler, Multithreaded Programs, Programming Languages, Trivial Non-performant Approach