Understanding the Impacts of Influencing Factors on Time to a DataRace Software Failure

Datarace is a common problem on shared-memory parallel computers, including multicores. Due to its dependence on the thread scheduling scheme of its execution environment, the time to a datarace failure is usually very long. How to accelerate the occurrence of a datarace failure and further estimate the mean time to failure (MTTF) is an important topic to be studied. In this paper, the influencing factors for failures triggered by datarace bugs are explored and their influences on the time to datarace failure including the relationship with the MTTF are empirically studied. Experiments are conducted on real datarace suffering programs to verify the factors and their influences. Empirical results show that the influencing factors do have influences on the time to datarace failure of the subjects. They can be used to accelerate the occurrence of datarace failures and accurately estimate the MTTF.