We argue that concurrency errors should be fail-stop. We want to put concurrency errors in the same category as segmentation fault and division-by-zero. This would make non-determinism in multithreaded execution be much more manageable. Concurrency exceptions would improve the debugging process during development and make crashes due to concurrency errors that happen in the field be more descriptive. Our goal with this project is to justify our position, propose a general approach to concurrency exceptions and discuss system requirements and implications. Specifically, we are investigating the semantics of concurrency exceptions at the language level, their implications in the compiler and runtime systems, how they should be delivered and finally how all they are enabled by efficient architecture support. In the same context, we are exploring the effects of weakening the memory model in software reliability.

Current contacts: Brandon Lucia, Ben Wood, Luis Ceze, Dan Grossman.

Publications

Data-Race Exceptions Have Benefits Beyond the Memory Model. Benjamin P. Wood, Luis Ceze, Dan Grossman. MSPC 2011.

Conflict Exceptions: Providing Simple Parallel Language Semantics with Precise Hardware Exceptions (ISCA 2010), Brandon Lucia, Luis Ceze, Karin Strauss, Shaz Qadeer, Hans Boehm

The Case for System Support for Concurrency Exceptions (USENIX HotPar 2009), Luis Ceze, Joseph Devietti, Brandon Lucia and Shaz Qadeer.