Are Determinacy-Race Bugs Lurking in Your Multicore Application? (2009)
Race conditions pose significant challenges in concurrent programming, particularly in multicore applications. Determinacy races, which occur when parallel strands access shared memory without proper synchronization, can lead to unpredictable behavior. Identifying and eliminating these bugs is crucial for ensuring the reliability of parallel programs.
- ▪Race conditions can lead to severe failures, as seen in incidents like the Therac-25 and the North American Blackout of 2003.
- ▪A determinacy race occurs when two parallel strands access the same memory location, with one performing a write operation.
- ▪The example provided illustrates how a simple increment operation can lead to a determinacy race if not handled correctly.
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| Canonical URL | https://web.archive.org/web/20091103173033/http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/are-determinacy-race-bugs-lurking-in-your-multicore-application |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 12:23:23 +0000 |
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by Charles LeisersonRace conditions are the bane of concurrency. Famous race bugs include the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine, which killed three people and injured several others, and the North American Blackout of 2003, which left over 50 million people without power. These pernicious bugs are notoriously hard to find. You can run regression tests in the lab for days without a failure only to discover that your software crashes in the field with regularity. If you're going to multicore-enable your application, you need a reliable way to find and eliminate race conditions. Different types of race conditions exist depending on the synchronization methodology (e.g., locking, condition variables, etc.) used to coordinate parallelism in the application.
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