Static Local Concurrency Errors Detection in MPI-RMA Programs

Abstract

Communications are a critical part of HPC simulations, and one of the main focuses of application developers when scaling on supercomputers. While classical message passing (also called two-sided communications) is the dominant communication paradigm, one-sided communications are often praised to be efficient to overlap communications with computations, but challenging to program. Their usage is then generally abstracted through languages and memory abstractions to ease programming (e.g. PGAS). Therefore, little work has been done to help programmers use intermediate runtime layers, such as MPI-RMA, that is often reserved to expert programmers. Indeed, programming with MPI - RMA presents several challenges that require handling the asynchronous nature of one-sided communications to ensure the proper semantics of the program while ensuring its memory consistency. To help programmers detect memory errors such as race conditions as early as possible, this paper proposes a new static analysis of MPI - RMA codes that shows to the programmer the errors that can be detected at compile time. The detection is based on a novel local concurrency errors detection algorithm that tracks accesses through BFS searches on the Control Flow Graphs of a program. We show on several tests and an MPI-RMA variant of the GUPS benchmark that the static analysis allows to detect such errors on user codes. The error codes are integrated in the MPI Bugs Initiative open-source test suite.