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Existing concurrency platforms for dynamic multithreading do not provide repeatable parallel random-number generators. This paper proposes that a mechanism called pedigrees be built into the runtime system to enable efficient deterministic parallel random-number generation. Experiments with the open-source MIT Cilk runtime system show that the overhead for maintaining pedigrees is negligible. Specifically, on a suite of 10 benchmarks, the relative overhead of Cilk with pedigrees to the original Cilk has a geometric mean of less than 1%.

We persuaded Intel to modify its commercial C/C++ compiler, which provides the Cilk Plus concurrency platform, to include pedigrees, and we built a library implementation of a deterministic parallel random-number generator called DotMix that compresses the pedigree and then "RC6-mixes" the result. The statistical quality of DotMix is comparable to that of the popular …