Bugaroo: Exposing Memory Model Bugs in Many-core Systems
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abstract
2018 IEEE. Modern many-core architectures such as GPUs aggressively reorder and buffer memory accesses. Updates to shared and global data are not guaranteed to be visible to concurrent threads immediately. Such updates can be made visible to other threads by using some fence instructions. Therefore, missing the required fences can introduce subtle bugs, called Memory Model Bugs. We propose Bugaroo to expose memory model bugs in any arbitrary GPU program. It works by statically instrumenting the code to buffer some shared and global data for as long as possible without violating the semantics of any fence or synchronization instruction. Any program failure that results from such buffering indicates the presence of subtle memory model bugs in the program. Bugaroo later provides detailed debugging information regarding the failure. Bugaroo is the first proposal to expose memory model bugs of GPU programs by simulating memory buffers. We present a detailed design and implementation of Bugaroo. We evaluated it using seven programs. Our approach uncovers new findings about missing and redundant fences in two of the programs. This makes Bugaroo an effective and useful tool for GPU programmers.
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2018 IEEE 29th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)
