Simulee: Detecting CUDA Synchronization Bugs via Memory-Access Modeling

While CUDA has become a mainstream parallel computing platform and programming model for general-purpose GPU computing, how to effectively and efficiently detect CUDA synchronization bugs remains a challenging open problem. In this paper, we propose the first lightweight CUDA synchronization bug detection framework, namely Simulee, to model CUDA program execution by interpreting the corresponding LLVM bytecode and collecting the memory-access information for automatically detecting general CUDA synchronization bugs. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of Simulee, we construct a benchmark with 7 popular CUDA-related projects from GitHub, upon which we conduct an extensive set of experiments. The experimental results suggest that Simulee can detect 21 out of the 24 manually identified bugs in our preliminary study and also 24 previously unknown bugs among all projects, 10 of which have already been confirmed by the developers. Furthermore, Simulee significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for CUDA synchronization bug detection.