Synchronization Error Detection of MPI Programs by Symbolic Execution

Asynchrony based overlapping of computation and communication is commonly used in MPI applications. However, this overlapping introduces synchronization errors frequently in asynchronous MPI programming. In this paper, we propose a symbolic execution based method for detecting input-related synchronization errors. The path space of an MPI program is systematically explored, and the related operations of the synchronization errors in the program are checked specifically. In addition, two optimizations are proposed to improve the efficiency. We have implemented our method as a prototype tool based on the symbolic executor Cloud9. The results of the extensive experiments indicate the effectiveness of our method.