Efficient cache-based access anomaly detection scheme

Abstract

One important issue in parallel program debugging is the efficient detection of access anomalies caused by uncoordinated accesses to shared variables. On-the-fly detection of access anomalies has two advantages over static analysis or post-mortem trace analysis. First, it reports only actual anomalies during execution. Second, it produces shorter traces for post-mortem analysis purposes if an anomaly is detected, since generating further trace information after the detection of an anomaly is of dubious value. Existing methods for on-the-fly access anomaly detection suffer from performance penalties since the execution of the program being debugged has to be interrupted on every access to shared variables. In this paper, we propose an efficient cache-based access anomaly detection scheme that piggybacks on the overhead already paid by the underlying cache coherence protocol.