Detect OpenMP Races

This tutorial shows how to use Coderrect to detect races in a single file multi-threaded C program written with OpenMP.

Prerequisites

Detect a race in pi.c

We will start by detecting a race in a small single file program pi.c. The program is designed to compute pi=3.1415926…. We provide this example program in the Examples directory under Coderrect installation, or you can copy the code below to your system.

//pi.c
#include <omp.h>
#include <stdio.h>

#define N 1000000000

int main () {

    double delta = 1.0/(double) N;
    int MAX_THREADS = omp_get_max_threads();
    // Compute parallel compute times for 1-MAX_THREADS
    for (int j=1; j<= MAX_THREADS; j++) {

        printf(" running on %d threads: ", j);
        omp_set_num_threads(j);

        double sum = 0.0;
        double start = omp_get_wtime();

        #pragma omp parallel for //reduction(+:sum)
        for (int i=0; i < N; i++) {
            double x = (i+0.5)*delta;
            sum += 4.0 / (1.0+x*x);
        }

        // Out of the parallel region, finalize computation
        double pi = delta * sum;
        double time_lapse = omp_get_wtime() - start;
        printf("PI = %.12g computed in %.4g secondsn", pi, time_lapse);
    }
}

Check that pi.c can be compiled and run with the following commands

gcc -fopenmp pi.c -o pi
./pi

You should see output that looks something like:

running on 1 threads: PI = 3.141592653589971 computed in 12.84 seconds
running on 2 threads: PI = 3.141593993623682 computed in 6.928 seconds
running on 3 threads: PI = 3.141594228301372 computed in 7.741 seconds
running on 4 threads: PI = 3.141595112697573 computed in 8.376 seconds

As you can see from the results, running on different number of threads generated different values of PI, indicating the existence of a concurrency bug.

Run Coderrect

The easiest way to run the tool is by passing the build command to coderrect:

coderrect -t gcc -fopenmp pi.c

Remember, the command to build pi.c was gcc -fopenmp pi.c.

-t switch is used to generate a quick summary report in terminal.

Calling coderrect in this way ensures all the required compilation flags can be passed on the command line. For a project using a build system such as make, coderrect tool can be called with the same build command used to build the project. For an example: checkout out detecting races in a Makefile-based project.

Interpret the Results

The coderrect tool reports a quick summary of the most interesting races directly in the terminal for quick viewing. The tool also generates a more comprehensive report that can be viewed in a browser.

Terminal Report

The terminal report for pi.c should look something like the following:

==== Found a race between: 
line 22, column 13 in test.c AND line 22, column 17 in test.c
Shared variable:
 at line 16 of test.c
 16|        double sum = 0.0;
Thread 1:
 20|        for (int i=0; i < N; i++) {
 21|            double x = (i+0.5)*delta;
>22|            sum += 4.0 / (1.0+x*x);
 23|        }
 24|
>>>Stacktrace:
Thread 2:
 20|        for (int i=0; i < N; i++) {
 21|            double x = (i+0.5)*delta;
>22|            sum += 4.0 / (1.0+x*x);
 23|        }
 24|
>>>Stacktrace:

                 1 OpenMP races

Each reported race starts with a summary of where the race was found.

==== Found a race between: 
line 22, column 13 in test.c AND line 22, column 17 in test.c

Next the report shows the variable name and location on which the race occurs.

Shared variable:
 at line 16 of test.c
 16|        double sum = 0.0;

This shows that the race occurs on the variable sum declared on line 16.

Going and finding the race location in the code may be a little tedious so the report also shows a preview of the file at that location.

Thread 1:
 20|        for (int i=0; i < N; i++) {
 21|            double x = (i+0.5)*delta;
>22|            sum += 4.0 / (1.0+x*x);
 23|        }

The code snippet shows that this racing access is a write to sum as part of an OpenMP parallel for loop.

Taking a closer look at the source code we can see the root cause is the commented out “reduction”. 

#pragma omp parallel for //reduction(+:sum)

Un-commenting reduction(+:sum) removes the data race on sum and allows the program to calculate pi correctly.

HTML Report

The terminal is great to get a quick idea about what races are reported, but the full report can be viewed in a browser.

We can also save the race report to a directory specified via the command option-o <dir>. 

coderrect -o report gcc -fopenmp pi.c

This created a directory named report and a file named index.html within that directory. To view the full report open the index.html file in a browser.