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EUROPAR
2010
Springer

Starsscheck: A Tool to Find Errors in Task-Based Parallel Programs

13 years 1 months ago
Starsscheck: A Tool to Find Errors in Task-Based Parallel Programs
Star Superscalar is a task-based programming model. The programmer starts with an ordinary C program, and adds pragmas to mark functions as tasks, identifying their inputs and outputs. When the main thread reaches a task, an instance of the task is added to a run-time dependency graph, and later scheduled to run on a processor. Variants of Star Superscalar exist for the Cell Broadband Engine and SMPs. Star Superscalar relies on the annotations provided by the programmer. If these are incorrect, the program may exhibit race conditions or exceptions deep inside the run-time system. This paper introduces Starsscheck, a tool based on Valgrind, which helps debug Star Superscalar programs. Starsscheck verifies that the pragma annotations are correct, producing a warning if a task or the main thread performs an invalid access. The tool can be adapted to support similar programming models such as TPC. For most benchmarks, Starsscheck is faster than memcheck, the default Valgrind tool.
Paul M. Carpenter, Alex Ramírez, Eduard Ayg
Added 11 Feb 2011
Updated 11 Feb 2011
Type Journal
Year 2010
Where EUROPAR
Authors Paul M. Carpenter, Alex Ramírez, Eduard Ayguadé
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