Noise injection techniques to expose subtle and unintended message races

Kento Sato, Dong H. Ahn, Ignacio Laguna, Gregory L. Lee, Martin Schulz, Christopher M. Chambreau

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Debugging intermittently occurring bugs within MPI applications is challenging, and message races, a condition in which two or more sends race to match with a receive, are one of the common root causes. Many debugging tools have been proposed to help programmers resolve them, but their runtime interference perturbs the timing such that subtle races often cannot be reproduced with debugging tools. We present novel noise injection techniques to expose message races even under a tool's control. We first formalize this race problem in the context of non-deterministic parallel applications and use this analysis to determine an effective noise-injection strategy to uncover them. We codified these techniques in Ninja (Noise INJection Agent) that exposes these races without modification to the application. Our evaluations on synthetic cases as well as a real-world bug in Hypre-2.10.1 show that Ninja significantly helps expose races.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPPoPP 2017 - Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages89-101
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450344937
DOIs
StatePublished - 26 Jan 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event22nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPoPP 2017 - Austin, United States
Duration: 4 Feb 20178 Feb 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPOPP

Conference

Conference22nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPoPP 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAustin
Period4/02/178/02/17

Keywords

  • Debugging
  • MPI
  • Non-determinism

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