An Empirical Analysis of Intel Thread Checker for Detecting Races in OpenMP Programs

Races in OpenMP programs must be detected because they may cause unintended nondeterministic results of pro-grams. The Intel Thread Checker can detect the races oc-curred in an execution of OpenMP program, but it has not been analyzed on the limitation of its power for race detec-tion in OpenMP programs. This paper empirically analyzes the functionality and performance of Thread Checker using a set of multithreaded synthetic programs. We have found that Thread Checker can not verify the existence of races in an execution of OpenMP program, and show that the ra-tio of the required time for race detection is dependent on the number of total accesses to shared variables in parallel section programs, but not in parallel loop programs.