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Efficent and highly portable deterministic multithreading (DetLock)

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Abstract

In this paper, we present DetLock, a runtime system to ensure deterministic execution of multithreaded programs running on multicore systems. DetLock does not rely on any hardware support or kernel modification to ensure determinism. For tracking the progress of the threads, logical clocks are used. Unlike previous approaches, which rely on non-portable hardware to update the logical clocks, DetLock employs a compiler pass to insert code for updating these clocks, thus increasing portability. For 4 cores, the average overhead of these clocks on tested benchmarks is brought down from 16 to 2 % by applying several optimizations. Moreover, the average overall overhead, including deterministic execution, is 14 %.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been funded by the projects Smecy 100230, iFEST 100203 and REFLECT 248976.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands

    Hamid Mushtaq, Zaid Al-Ars & Koen Bertels

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  1. Hamid Mushtaq
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  2. Zaid Al-Ars
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  3. Koen Bertels
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hamid Mushtaq.

Additional information

In this paper, we extended DetLock, whose paper was published in MuCoCos 2012 affiliated with SC12. In this journal paper, we further improve the performance of DetLock by applying several more optimizations. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance with several more benchmarks.

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Mushtaq, H., Al-Ars, Z. & Bertels, K. Efficent and highly portable deterministic multithreading (DetLock). Computing 96, 1131–1147 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-013-0370-9

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