Detecting Thread-Safety Violations in Hybrid OpenMP/MPI Programs

Abstract

We propose an approach by integrating static and dynamic program analyses to detect thread-safety violations in hybrid MPI/OpenMP programs. We innovatively transform the thread-safety violation problems to race conditions problems. In our approach, the static analysis identifies a list of MPI calls related to thread-safety violations, then replaces them with our own MPI wrappers, which involve accesses to some specific shared variables. The static analysis avoids instrumenting unrelated code, which significantly reduces runtime overhead. In the dynamic analysis, both happen-before and lockset-based race detection algorithms are used to detect races on these aforementioned shared variables. By detecting races, we can identify thread-safety violations according to their specifications. Our experimental evaluation over real-world applications shows that our approach is both accurate and efficient.