4. Check Dependencies

Using the Dependencies Report

The Dependencies tool performs extensive analysis of your running serial program's executable (target) to predict the likely data sharing and related problems, such as data races.

Specify a minimal data set or corresponding run-time parameters and build a Debug build target executable (no optimization and full debug information). Specify this target and run the Dependencies tool. The Dependencies tool takes significantly longer to analyze your program because it must observe all memory accesses within the parallel sites. If you provide a minimal input data set for the Dependencies tool's target, you may be able to reduce the program's run-time (as described in Minimizing Data Collection, Result Size, and Execution Time (Dependencies)). Once data collection completes, the data collected during analysis appears in the Dependencies Report window in the Result tab. If the Dependencies tool did not detect any Problems, a No Problems Detected message appears instead.

To view details about a specific problem or code location, double-click its data row or source line (or right click a row and select View Source from the context menu) to display the Dependencies Source window. To return to the Dependencies Report window, click the Dependencies Report button.

To display and edit sources in a code editor, right-click a line and select Edit Source from the context menu. When using the Intel Advisor GUI, the editor defined by the Options > Editor dialog box appears with the file open at the corresponding location. Later, to return to the Dependencies Report or Dependencies Source window, click the Result tab.

For help using the Dependencies Report and Dependencies Source windows, see Viewing Data from the Dependencies Tool.

Next Steps

After you examine the data in the Dependencies Report and Dependencies Source windows, choose one of the following:

• If the Dependencies Report shows problems, you need to investigate them. Fix the problems by either restructuring your program's use of the shared data or by adding lock annotations. There are different types of problems, which are listed in About Message and Problem Types. A separate topic explains fixing sharing problems - see Check Dependencies and Fix Problems.
• If the Dependencies Report does not identify any problems, view the high-level summary of annotations in the Annotation Report window to help you decide whether to modify or keep the annotations. In most cases, you should fix the sharing problems before you proceed to the add parallelism step.