An Introduction to the Cilk Screen Race Detector

One of the pitfalls of parallel programming is the need to consider whether your code modifies a memory location in two parallel strands. Doing so is called a race because whether you get the correct answer depends on the timing of the executed instructions.  Parallel reads are OK, since the value doesn’t change.  But two writes, or a read and a write in parallel are errors. Consider the following code which increments a global location:

mov MEM, rax    ;; Move the value of MEM to rax
add rax, 1      ;; Increment rax
mov rax, MEM    ;; Store rax into MEM

Now consider what can happen if this sequence is executed in parallel by two threads.  Assume “MEM” starts with a value of 7.

At the end of the sequence, we expect MEM to have a value of 9.  But if the two threads run at the same time (or are interleaved), MEM will end up with the value 8.  Finding this sort of bad behavior by inspection is difficult.  Fortunately, this is the type of detail-oriented problem that computers are good at.

The Cilk Screen Race Detector monitors your application for all reads from and writes to memory and reports on any read/write or write/write conflicts it finds. A race is reported if any possible schedule of the program can produce results that may be different from the serial execution of the program.  Note that Cilk screen will only report on the Cilk parallel region.  It will ignore any other threads created by the program using other threading packages or the OS’ native calls.

#include <cilk/cilk.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int sum = 0;

void add_to_sum(int i)
{
    sum += i;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    cilk_spawn add_to_sum(1);
    add_to_sum(2);
    cilk_sync;

    printf("The sum is: %dn", sum);
    return 0;
}

To run your application under Cilk screen, simply prefix the command to invoke your application with the “cilkscreen --” command. The “--” indicates the start of your command and is optional:

C:sumx64Debug>cilkscreen -- sum.exe
Cilkscreen Race Detector V2.0.0, Build 3327 for Intel64

Race condition on location 000000013F87A150
  write access at 000000013F8712E5: (C:sum.cpp:8, sum.exe!add_to_sum+0x45)
  read access at 000000013F8712DF: (C:sum.cpp:8, sum.exe!add_to_sum+0x3f)
    called by 000000013F871474: (C:sum.cpp:14, sum.exe!main+0x182)
Variable: 000000013F87A150 - sum

Race condition on location 000000013F87A150
  write access at 000000013F8712E5: (C:sum.cpp:8, sum.exe!add_to_sum+0x45)
  write access at 000000013F8712E5: (C:sum.cpp:8, sum.exe!add_to_sum+0x45)
    called by 000000013F871474: (C:sum.cpp:14, sum.exe!main+0x182)
Variable: 000000013F87A150 - sum
The sum is: 3
2 errors found by Cilkscreen
Cilkscreen suppressed 1 duplicate error messages

By default Cilk screen will write it’s output to stderr. You can redirect it using the –r option to specify a file to receive the information in text format, or the –x option to specify that the information is to be written as XML.   You can get a full list of the Cilk screen options using -? or --help.

Race condition on location 000000013F87A150

Cilk screen detected a race condition at memory location 0x13F87A150

write access at 000000013F8712E5: (C:\sum.cpp:8, sum.exe!add_to_sum+0x45)

The first access that participated in the race was a write from the instruction at 0x13F8712E5, which is 0x45 bytes from the start of the function add_to_sum(), which is in image sum.exe.  The instruction corresponds to line 8 of the source file sum.cpp.

read access at 000000013F8712DF: (C:\sum.cpp:8, sum.exe!add_to_sum+0x3f)

The second access that participated in the race was a read from the instruction at 0x13F8713DF, which is 0x3F from the start of the function add_to_sum(), which is in image sum.exe.  The instruction corresponds to line 8 of the source file sum.cpp.

called by 000000013F871474: (C:\sum.cpp:14, sum.exe!main+0x182)

Cilk screen displays the callstack for the second memory reference involved in the race.  add_to_sum() was called by main() at line 14 in sum.cpp, which corresponds to the CALL instruction at offset 0x182 of main() in sum.exe.

While reporting the callstack for both accesses would be preferable, maintaining the callstack for every memory access in case there’s a race would be expensive in both memory and time.

Variable: 000000013F87A150 - sum

On Windows, Cilk screen will attempt to symbolize the memory address.  This information is not available on other platforms at this time.

The sum is: 3

This line is output from the program.  Since we didn’t redirect the diagnostic output to a file, it is intermingled with the output from the program.

2 errors found by Cilkscreen

Cilkscreen suppressed 1 duplicate error messages

At the conclusion of the run, Cilk screen will summarize the errors it found and how many duplicate errors it suppressed.  You can use the –a option to have Cilk screen report all errors if you wish.

It’s important to emphasize that you do not need to have sources available to use Cilk screen.  We worked with a customer who found races in a 3^rd party library they were calling from their Cilk code.  You can see this for yourself using the following code:

#include <cilk/cilk.h>
#include <iostream>
 
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    cilk_for(int i = 0; i < 20; i++)
    {
        std::cout << i << std::endl;
    }
 
    return 0;
}

It’s well known that C++ stream I/O is not thread safe.  This will show you why.