Correctness Analysis Based on Testing and Checking for OpenMP Programs

Li, Jianjiang; Hei, Dan; Yan, Lin

doi:10.1109/chinagrid.2009.12

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Published research in the general area of concurrent program testing has covered aspects such as failure injection , static analysis , controlled execution , mutation testing , model checking , model‐based testing , coverage testing , symbolic analysis , reachability testing and test case generation . In this section are discussed only the relevant related research.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical evaluation of a new composite approach to the coverage criteria and reachability testing of concurrent programs

Souza

Brito

et al. 2015

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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SUMMARYTesting is a key activity to assure the quality of concurrent applications. In recent years, a variety of different mechanisms have been proposed to test concurrent software. However, a persistent problem is the high testing cost because of the large number of different synchronization sequences that must be tested. When structural testing criteria are adopted, a large number of infeasible synchronization sequences is generated, increasing the testing cost. Although the use of reachability testing reduces the number of infeasible combination (because only feasible synchronization sequences are generated), many synchronization combinations are also generated, and this again results in a testing cost with exponential behavior. This paper presents a new composite approach that uses reachability testing to guide the selection of the synchronization sequences tests according to a specific structural testing criterion. This new composite approach is empirically evaluated in the context of message-passing concurrent programs developed with MPI. The experimental study evaluates both the cost and effectiveness of proposed composite approach in comparison with traditional reachability testing and structural testing. The results confirm that the use of the new composite approach has advantages for testing of concurrent applications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: structural testing; reachability testing; concurrent programs; experimental study INTRODUCTIONConcurrent software is being increasingly used with the availability of multicore processors and computer clusters. Many modern business applications now use concurrency to improve overall system performance. However, all concurrent software contains features, such as nondeterminism, synchronization, and interprocess communication, which make concurrent software significantly more complex than sequential software. These features impose new challenges for testing and increase the difficulty of demonstrating the correct execution of the application in all possible conditions. Traditional testing techniques are often not well-suited to the testing of concurrent (or parallel) software. Many researchers have developed specific testing techniques to address specific issues such as nondeterminism, concurrency, communication, synchronization, race conditions, and replay testing [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11].In previous work, structural testing criteria for concurrent programs were proposed by Souza et al. [12], defining test models and tools to test message-passing software. This work was extended by Sarmanho et al. [13] to test shared-memory software. These structural testing criteria are designed to explore information about the control, data, and communication flows of concurrent programs, considering both their sequential and parallel aspects. These contributions are related to the coverage analysis concept, in which a coverage model is first defined, and then the model is evaluated during the execution of the program to determine whether th...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical evaluation of a new composite approach to the coverage criteria and reachability testing of concurrent programs

Souza

Brito

et al. 2015

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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“…But Intel Thread Checker does not consider OpenMP programs specifications and can therefore report false positives. Li et al present in [7] an online-offline model to test the correctness of every OpenMP parallel region. The online correctness testing model is used to find parallel regions with incorrect execution results (not corresponding to serial execution results), identify all places that caused errors (directives used improperly or located wrongly) and correct them.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Static Validation of Barriers and Worksharing Constructs in OpenMP Applications

Saillard

Carribault

Barthou

2014

Using and Improving OpenMP for Devices, Tasks, and More

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Abstract. The OpenMP specification requires that all threads in a team execute the same sequence of worksharing and barrier regions. An improper use of such directive may lead to deadlocks. In this paper we propose a static analysis to ensure this property is verified. The well-defined semantic of OpenMP programs makes compiler analysis more effective. We propose a new compile-time method to identify in OpenMP codes the potential improper uses of barriers and worksharing constructs, and the execution paths that are responsible for these issues. We implemented our method in a GCC compiler plugin and show the small impact of our analysis on performance for NAS-OMP benchmarks and a test case for a production industrial code. IntroductionOpenMP is a popular parallel programming model for shared memory machines. While OpenMP aims at making parallel programming easier, there are a number of improper uses of worksharing constructs and barriers that are not statically detected by compilers and may lead to deadlock or unspecified behavior. Indeed, the OpenMP specification requires that all threads of a team must execute the same sequence of worksharing constructs and barriers [16]. However in practice no error occurs when all threads of a team do not execute exactly the same barrier. That is why we authorize threads synchronizations with different barriers and defined two verbosity levels (0 and 1) defining soft and hard barriers verifications. Throughout the rest of the paper, examples are presented with verbosity level 0.To show the difficulty to enforce this constraint in OpenMP codes, consider the motivating examples in Figure 1. In function f of Listing 1.1, each thread may or may not encounter the single construct line 9, depending on the control flow (line 6). According to the OpenMP specification, all threads in a team should encounter the same single, or none of them. However, compiling this code and executing it does not lead to a syntactic error but to a deadlock. Indeed, if the result of the conditional is not the same among all threads, the first barrier executed will be for some threads the implicit barrier line 12 (end of single) while for others, it will be the explicit barrier line 14. Then the first group of threads will stop at the explicit barrier line 14 while the second group will stop at the barrier related to the end of the parallel region. Finally, the first set of threads will be released and eventually deadlock at this last barrier. Note that if Listing 1.1.

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“…Li et al [9] presented a tool for OpenMP checking based on a hybrid methodology involving online testing (comparing the results of serial and parallel executions) and offline testing (recording the values of the variables at the entry and the exit of parallel constructs of a serial execution and comparing these values with those of parallel executions). Ha et al [7] used a hybrid technique that combines happens-before analysis and lockset analysis for efficiently detecting data-races at runtime.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Compiler analysis for OpenMP tasks correctness

Royuela

Ferrer

Caballero

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers

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OpenMP has become the most frequently used programming model for shared memory parallel systems by virtue of its simplicity and scalability. Notwithstanding its easiness, the constant evolution of OpenMP brings forth difficulties when it comes to keep up with its capabilities. Compilers are key tools to anticipate bugs that may appear at runtime. Despite this, most compilers do not diagnose common mistakes that cause execution errors. Furthermore, many compilers do not yet implement the latest extensions of the OpenMP asynchronous model, and there are no checking systems to properly identify errors in that model.In this paper, we focus on the mistakes derived from the usage of OpenMP tasks. We define a data-flow algorithm that computes the live tasks at every point of the program. Based on that, we present different scenarios and the analyses that allow detecting possible runtime failures, loss of performance or non-deterministic results. We have implemented all the analyses in the Mercurium source-to-source compiler, which, based on the results, suggests changes to the user in order to avoid runtime problems. We test our implementation with over 70 students and 6 benchmarks, as well as with the results of the Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 compiler, which warns about correctness issues related to the scope of variables in OpenMP.

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Correctness Analysis Based on Testing and Checking for OpenMP Programs

Cited by 14 publications

References 7 publications

Empirical evaluation of a new composite approach to the coverage criteria and reachability testing of concurrent programs

Empirical evaluation of a new composite approach to the coverage criteria and reachability testing of concurrent programs

Static Validation of Barriers and Worksharing Constructs in OpenMP Applications

Compiler analysis for OpenMP tasks correctness

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