MPIRace-Check: Detection of message races in MPI programs

Abstract

Message races, which can cause nondeterministic executions of a parallel program, should be detected for debugging because nondeterminism makes debugging parallel programs a difficult task. Even though there are some tools to detect message races in MPI programs, they do not provide practical information to locate and debug message races in MPI programs. In this paper, we present an on-the-fly detection tool, which is MPIRace-Check, for debugging MPI programs written in C language. MPIRace-Check detects and reports all race conditions in all processes by checking the concurrency of the communication between processes. Also it reports the message races with some practical information such as the line number of a source code, the processes number, and the channel information which are involved in the races. By providing those information, it lets programmers distinguish of unintended races among the reported races, and lets the programmers know directly where the races occur in a huge source code. In the experiment we will show that MPIRace-Check detects the races using some testing programs as well as the tool is efficient. ? Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.