Embedding semantics of the single-producer/single-consumer lock-free queue into a race detection tool

The rapid progress of multi-/many-core architectures has caused data-intensive parallel applications not yet be fully suited for getting the maximum performance. The advent of parallel programming frameworks offering structured pat- terns has alleviated developers' burden adapting such applications to parallel platforms. For example, the use of synchronization mechanisms in multithreaded applications is essential on shared-cache multi-core architectures. How- ever, ensuring an appropriate use of their interfaces can be challenging, since different memory models plus instruction reordering at compiler/processor levels may inuence the occurrence of data races. The benefits of race detectors are formidable in this sense, nevertheless if lock-free data structures with no high-level atomics are used, they may emit false positives. In this paper, we extend the ThreadSani- tizer race detection tool in order to support semantics of the general Single-Producer/Single-Consumer (SPSC) lock- free parallel queue and to detect benign data races where it was correctly used. To perform our analysis, we leverage the FastFlow SPSC bounded lock-free queue implementa- tion to test our extensions over a set of μ-benchmarks and real applications on a dual-socket Intel Xeon CPU E5-2695 platform. We demonstrate that this approach can reduce, on average, 30% the number of data race warning messages.