Macaulay2 / Macaulay2/M2

freeResolution and syz are not thread-safe

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Description

Many operations rely on computing resolutions or syzygies, so naturally these two not being thread-safe makes lots of Macaulay2 un-parallelizable.

I came across this because I wanted to compute Ext of a single module against several different modules, which involves computing resolutions of the same module for each call to Ext. Here's a simpler example to try out:

S = kk[x,y,z];
M = truncate(5, S^1);
f = i -> schedule(freeResolution, M);
apply(2, f)
taskResult \ oo
class \ oo

Result:

i4 : apply(2, f)

o4 = {<<task, created>>, <<task, created>>}

o4 : List

i5 : /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/macaulay2/1.25.06_2/share/Macaulay2/Complexes/FreeResolutions.m2:91:17:(2):[3]: error: key not found in hash table:
        isComputable (of class Symbol)
/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/macaulay2/1.25.06_2/share/Macaulay2/Core/methods.m2:154:98:(1):[2]: --back trace--
/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/macaulay2/1.25.06_2/share/Macaulay2/Core/option.m2:17:14:(1):[1]: --back trace--
/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/macaulay2/1.25.06_2/share/Macaulay2/Core/option.m2:17:14:(1): --back trace--

       C-c C-c^C

i5 : taskResult \ oo

       21      35      15
o5 = {S   <-- S   <-- S  , }
                       
      0       1       2

o5 : List

i6 : class \ oo

o6 = {Complex, Nothing}

o6 : List

Similarly, running syz gens M several times in parallel causes crashes in threads:

i4 : apply(5, i -> schedule(syz, gens M))

o4 = {<<task, running>>, <<task, running>>, <<task, created>>, <<task, created>>, <<task, created>>}

o4 : List

i5 : -- SIGSEGV
-- SIGSEGV
-- SIGSEGV handler called a second time, aborting
*--* stack trace, pid: 
Process M2 exited abnormally with code 2

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First steps

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  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the parallel freeResolution and syz examples, then inspect Complexes/FreeResolutions.m2:91 and the referenced Core/methods.m2 and Core/option.m2 paths. Determine why concurrent calls access shared state unsafely. Done means repeated parallel calls complete without errors or crashes and produce the same results as serial calls.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
backend, performance
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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