Embedding Semantics of the Single-Producer/Single-Consumer Lock-Free Queue into a Race Detection Tool

Abstract

The rapid progress of multi-/many-core architectures has caused data-intensive parallel applications not yet be fully suited for getting the maximum performance. The advent of parallel programming frameworks offering structured patterns has alleviated developers' burden adapting such applications to parallel platforms. For example, the use of synchronization mechanisms in multithreaded applications is essential on shared-cache multi-core architectures. However, ensuring an appropriate use of their interfaces can be challenging, since different memory models plus instruction reordering at compiler/processor levels may influence the occurrence of data races. The benefits of race detectors are formidable in this sense, nevertheless if lock-free data structures with no high-level atomics are used, they may emit false positives. In this paper, we extend the ThreadSanitizer race detection tool in order to support semantics of the general Single-Producer/Single-Consumer (SPSC) lock-free parallel queue and to detect benign data races where it was correctly used. To perform our analysis, we leverage the FastFlow SPSC bounded lock-free queue implementation to test our extensions over a set of μ-benchmarks and real applications on a dual-socket Intel Xeon CPU E5-2695 platform. We demonstrate that this approach can reduce, on average, 30% the number of data race warning messages.