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Deterministic OpenMP

Amittai F. Aviram
Ph.D. thesis advised by Bryan Ford
September 20, 2012

Abstract:

Researchers widely agree that determinism in parallel programs is desirable. Although experimental parallel programming languages have long featured deterministic semantics, in mainstream parallel environments, developers still build on non-deterministic constructs such as mutexes, leading to time- or schedule-dependent heisenbugs. To make deterministic programming more accessible, we introduce DOMP, a deterministic extension to OpenMP, preserving the familiarity of traditional languages such as C and Fortran, and maintaining source-compatibility with much of the existing OpenMP standard. Our analysis of parallel idioms used in 35 popular benchmarks suggests that the idioms used most often (89% of instances in the analyzed code) are either already expressible in OpenMP’s deterministic subset (74%), or merely lack more general reduction (12%) or pipeline (3%) constructs. DOMP broadens OpenMP’s deterministic subset with generalized reductions, and implements an efficient deterministic runtime that acts as a drop-in replacement for Gnu’s widely used conventional OpenMP support library GOMP, on mainstream Unix platforms. We evaluate DOMP with several existing OpenMP benchmarks, each requiring under 50 source line changes and a majority requiring none, as well as several benchmarks we ported to OpenMP/DOMP. We find DOMP’s efficiency and scalability comparable to GOMP in 7 of 11 benchmarks, suggesting that a deterministic model for mainstream parallel programming may be well within reach.

Ph.D. Thesis: PDF

Defense Slides: PDF



Topics: Operating Systems Determinism Parallelism Programming Languages Bryan Ford