Atom-Aid: Detecting and Surviving Atomicity Violations

ABSTRACT

Writing shared-memory parallel programs is error-prone. Among the concurrency errors that programmers often face are atomicity violations, which are especially challenging. They happen when programmers make incorrect assumptions about atomicity and fail to enclose memory accesses that should occur atomically inside the same critical section. If these accesses happen to be interleaved with conflicting accesses from different threads, the program might behave incorrectly. Recent architectural proposals arbitrarily group consecutive dynamic memory operations into atomic blocks to enforce memory ordering at a coarse grain. This provides what we call implicit atomicity, as the atomic blocks are not derived from explicit program annotations. In this paper, we make the fundamental observation that implicit atomicity probabilistically hides atomicity violations by reducing the number of interleaving opportunities between memory operations. We then propose Atom-Aid, which creates implicit atomic blocks intelligently instead of arbitrarily, dramatically reducing the probability that atomicity violations will manifest themselves. Atom-Aid is also able to report where atomicity violations might exist in the code, providing resilience and debuggability. We evaluate Atom-Aid using buggy code from applications including Apache, MySQL, and XMMS, showing that Atom-Aid virtually eliminates the manifestation of atomicity violations.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.3 MEMORY STRUCTURES
      B.3.2 Design Styles
          Subjects: Shared memory

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles
          Subjects: Memory technologies
  B.8 Performance and Reliability
      B.8.1 Reliability, Testing, and Fault-Tolerance
      B.8.2 Performance Analysis and Design Aids

  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

  F. Theory of Computation
  F.1 COMPUTATION BY ABSTRACT DEVICES
      F.1.2 Modes of Computation
          Subjects: Probabilistic computation

General Terms:
Design, Performance, Verification

Keywords:
multiprocessors, parallel programming, bug, software reliability