OCTET: capturing and controlling cross-thread dependences efficiently

Abstract

Parallel programming is essential for reaping the benefits of parallel hardware, but it is notoriously difficult to develop and debug reliable, scalable software systems. One key challenge is that modern languages and systems provide poor support for ensuring concurrency correctness properties - atomicity, sequential consistency, and multithreaded determinism - because all existing approaches are impractical. Dynamic, software-based approaches slow programs by up to an order of magnitude because capturing and controlling cross-thread dependences (i.e., conflicting accesses to shared memory) requires synchronization at virtually every access to potentially shared memory.