ARBALEST: Dynamic Detection of Data Mapping Issues in Heterogeneous OpenMP Applications

Abstract

From OpenMP 4.0 onwards, programmers can offload code regions to accelerators by using the target offloading feature. However, incorrect usage of target offloading constructs may incur data mapping issues. A data mapping issue occurs when the host fails to observe updates on the accelerator or vice versa. It may further lead to multiple memory issues such as use of uninitialized memory, use of stale data, and data race. To the best of our knowledge, currently there is no prior work on dynamic detection of data mapping issues in heterogeneous OpenMP applications.In this paper, we identify possible root causes of data mapping issues in OpenMP’s standard memory model and the unified memory model. We find that data mapping issues primarily result from incorrect settings of map and nowait clauses in target offloading constructs. Further, the novel unified memory model introduced in OpenMP 5.0 cannot avoid the occurrence of data mapping issues. To mitigate the difficulty of detecting data mapping issues, we propose ARBALEST, an on-the-fly data mapping issue detector for OpenMP applications. For each variable mapped to the accelerator, ARBALEST’s detection algorithm leverages a state machine to track the last write’s visibility. ARBALEST requires constant storage space for each memory location and takes amortized constant time per memory access. To demonstrate ARBALEST’s effectiveness, an experimental comparison with four other dynamic analysis tools (Valgrind, Archer, AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer) has been carried out on a number of open-source benchmark suites. The evaluation results show that ARBALEST delivers demonstrably better precision than the other four tools, and its execution time overhead is comparable to that of state-of-the-art dynamic analysis tools.