Parallel Programming with Intel® Parallel Studio XE

Chapter 8

Checking for Errors

What's in This Chapter?

Detecting threading errors

Fixing data races

Detecting memory errors

Controlling the right level of detail

Creating a custom analysis

Using multiple threads with common memory can easily lead to parallel-type errors, such as data races and deadlocks. Resolving these errors can often be frustrating and time-consuming, so it is vital that you detect them at an early stage of development.

You can use several different tools from Parallel Studio XE to help debug your parallel programs:

• Parallel Advisor — Advisor guides developers to add parallelism within their existing C/C++ programs. However, you need to add Advisor notations to identify the possible parallel regions. For more details, see Chapter 10, “Parallel Advisor–Driven Design.”
• Parallel Debugger Extension — This extension pairs the parallel tools provided for developing multithreaded applications with the debug extensions, to allow for parallel features within the debugger. See Chapter 11, “Debugging Parallel Applications,” for more details.
• Static Security analysis — Static Security analysis is carried out by the compiler and identifies both coding errors and security vulnerabilities through deep analysis of the source code. However, no final execution file is produced. For more details, see Chapter 5, “Writing Secure Code.”

This chapter describes the operation of Intel Parallel Inspector XE, which you can use to find threading and memory errors after you have attempted ...