SigRace: Signaturebased data race detection

Detecting data races in parallel programs is important for both soft-ware development and production-run diagnosis. Recently, there have been several proposals for hardware-assisted data race detec-tion. Such proposals typically modify the L1 cache and cache co-herence protocol messages, and largely lose their capability when lines get displaced or invalidated from the cache. To avoid these shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel approach to hardware-assisted data race detection. The approach, called SigRace, relies on hardware address signatures. As a processor runs, the addresses of the data that it accesses are automatically encoded in signatures. At certain times, the signatures are automatically passed to a hard-ware module that intersects them with those of other processors. If the intersection is not null, a data race may have occurred. This paper presents the architecture of SigRace, an implemen-tation, and its software interface. With SigRace, caches and co-herence protocol messages are unmodied. Moreover, cache lines can be displaced and invalidated with no effect. Our experiments show that SigRace is signicantly more effective than a state-of-the-art conventional hardware-assisted race detector. SigRace nds on average 29 % more static races and 107 % more dynamic races. Moreover, if we inject data races, SigRace nds 150 % more static races than the conventional scheme