Raghavan Raman Oracle Labs

A common workflow for developing parallel software is as follows: 1) start with a sequential program, 2) identify subcomputations that should be converted to parallel tasks, 3) insert synchronization to achieve the same semantics as the sequential program, and 4) re-peat steps 2) and 3) as needed to improve performance. Though this is not the only approach to developing parallel software, it is sufficiently common to warrant special attention as parallel pro-gramming becomes ubiquitous. This paper focuses on automating step 3), which is usually the hardest step for developers who lack expertise in parallel programming. Past solutions to the problem of repairing parallel programs have used static-only or dynamic-only approaches, both of which incur significant limitations in practice. Static approaches can guar-antee soundness in many cases but are limited in precision whe