Deadlock Detection for MPI Programs Based on Refined Match-sets

Deadlock is one of the critical problems in the message passing interface. At present, most techniques for detecting the MPI deadlock issue rely on exhausting all execution paths of a program, which is extremely inefficient. In addition, with the increasing number of wildcards that receive events and processes, the number of execution paths raises exponentially, further worsening the situation. To alleviate the problem, we propose a deadlock detection approach called SAMPI based on match-sets to avoid exploring execution paths. In this approach, a match detection rule is employed to form the rough match-sets based on Lazy Lamport Clocks Protocol. Then we design three refining algorithms based on the non-overtaking rule and MPI communication mechanism to refine the match-sets. Finally, deadlocks are detected by analyzing the refined match-sets. We performed the experimental evaluation on 15 various programs, and the experimental results show that SAMPI is really efficient in detecting deadlocks in MPI programs, especially in handling programs with many interleavings.