An Empirical Analysis of Intel Thread Checker for Detecting Races in OpenMP Programs

Races in OpenMP programs must be detected because they may cause unintended nondeterministic results of programs. The Intel thread checker can detect the races occurred in an execution of OpenMP program, but it has not been analyzed on the limitation of its power for race detection in OpenMP programs. This paper empirically analyzes the functionality and performance of thread checker using a set of multithreaded synthetic programs. We have found that thread checker can not verify the existence of races in an execution of OpenMP program, and show that the ratio of the required time for race detection is dependent on the number of total accesses to shared variables in parallel section programs, but not in parallel loop programs.