Testing Atomicity of Composed Concurrent Operations

The authors address the problem of testing atomicity of composed concurrent operations. Concurrent libraries help programmers exploit parallel hardware by providing scalable concurrent operations with the illusion that each operation is executed atomically. However, client code often needs to compose atomic operations in such a way that the resulting composite operation is also atomic while preserving scalability. They present a novel technique for testing the atomicity of client code composing scalable concurrent operations. The challenge in testing this kind of client code is that a bug may occur very rarely and only on a particular interleaving with a specific thread configuration.