Title
Noise Injection Techniques to Expose Subtle and Unintended Message Races.
Abstract
Debugging intermittently occurring bugs within MPI applications is challenging, and message races, a condition in which two or more sends race to match with a receive, are one of the common root causes. Many debugging tools have been proposed to help programmers resolve them, but their runtime interference perturbs the timing such that subtle races often cannot be reproduced with debugging tools. We present novel noise injection techniques to expose message races even under a tool's control. We first formalize this race problem in the context of non-deterministic parallel applications and use this analysis to determine an effective noise-injection strategy to uncover them. We codified these techniques in NINJA (Noise INJection Agent) that exposes these races without modification to the application. Our evaluations on synthetic cases as well as a real-world bug in Hypre-2.10.1 show that NINJA significantly helps expose races.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3018743.3018767
PPOPP
Keywords
Field
DocType
debugging,non-determinism,MPI
Programming language,EXPOSE,Computer science,Distributed computing,Debugging
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
52
8
0362-1340
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.40
14
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kento Sato119211.43
Dong H. Ahn232522.61
Ignacio Laguna323924.56
Gregory L. Lee419914.30
Martin Schulz52227129.64
Christopher M. Chambreau630.40