Improving the Efficiency of Deadlock Detection in MPI Programs through Trace Compression

This paper presents a static deadlock analysis for single-path MPI programs. Deadlock is when processes are block indefinitely by a circular communication dependency. A single path program is one that does not decode messages for control flow. The analysis records a program execution in the form of a trace and then determines from that trace whether there exists any feasible deadlocking schedules. The primary contribution is the combining of identical consecutive sends or receives into single macro actions. This simplified trace is analyzed for potential deadlock cycles. An abstract machine identifies infeasible cycles, and those not identified by the machine are encoded as satisfiability problems for an SMT solver to resolve. The action combination reduces the complexity of identifying and filtering cycles before needing the costly SMT solver. This paper shows the effectiveness of the action combination in experiments on a benchmark suite comparing to traces without action combination and other state-of-the-art deadlock analyses.