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Deadlocks, in which threads wait on each other in a cyclic fashion and can't make progress, have plagued parallel programs for decades. In recent years, as the parallel programming mechanism known as futures has gained popularity, interest in preventing deadlocks in programs with futures has increased as well. Various static and dynamic algorithms exist to detect and prevent deadlock in programs with futures, generally by constructing some approximation of the dependency graph of the program but, as far as we are aware, all are specialized to a particular programming language. A recent paper introduced graph types, by which one can statically approximate the dependency graphs of a program in a language-independent fashion. By analyzing the graph type directly instead of the source code, a graph-based program analysis, such as one to detect deadlock, can be made language-independent. Indeed, the paper that proposed graph types also proposed a deadlock detection algorithm. Unfortunately, the algorithm was based on an unproven conjecture which we show to be false. In this paper, we present, and prove sound, a type system for finding possible deadlocks in programs that operates over graph types and can therefore be applied to many different languages. As a proof of concept, we have implemented the algorithm over a subset of the OCaml language extended with built-in futures.
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Pipelines and Beyond: Graph Types for ADTs with Futures
Parallel programs are frequently modeled asdependencyorcostgraphs, which can be used to detect various bugs, or simply to visualize the parallel structure of the code. However, such graphs reflect just one particular execution and are typically constructed in apost-hocmanner.Graph types, which were introduced recently to mitigate this problem, can be assigned statically to a program by a type system and compactly represent the family of all graphs that could result from the program. Unfortunately, prior work is restricted in its treatment offutures, an increasingly common and especially dynamic form of parallelism. In short, each instance of a future must be statically paired with a vertex name. Previously, this led to the restriction that futures could not be placed in collections or be used to construct data structures. Doing so is not a niche exercise: such structures form the basis of numerous algorithms that use forms of pipelining to achieve performance not attainable without futures. All but the most limited of these examples are out of reach of prior graph type systems. In this paper, we propose a graph type system that allows for almost arbitrary combinations of futures and recursive data types. We do so by indexing datatypes with a type-levelvertex structure, a codata structure that supplies unique vertex names to the futures in a data structure. We prove the soundness of the system in a parallel core calculus annotated with vertex structures and associated operations. Although the calculus is annotated, this is merely for convenience in defining the type system. We prove that it is possible to annotate arbitrary recursive types with vertex structures, and show using a prototype inference engine that these annotations can be inferred from OCaml-like source code for several complex parallel algorithms.
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- PAR ID:
- 10604564
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- POPL
- ISSN:
- 2475-1421
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 482-511
- Size(s):
- p. 482-511
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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