An Approach to Formalization and Analysis of Message Passing Libraries

Palmer, Robert L.; DeLisi, Michael; Gopalakrishnan, Ganesh; Kirby, Robert M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-79707-4_13

Cited by 9 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…MPI-Spin [49] includes a description of many MPI functions. In [27], we wrote a description for many MPI functions in TLA+ [50]; this was expanded into a description of nearly 150 MPI functions in [28]. The ISP tool [33,32] bypasses the need to model MPI functions by relying on the native semantics of an actual MPI library implementation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some of the earlier publications of our group in this area pertained to the use of model checking to analyze MPI programs [25,26], an executable formal semantic specification of MPI [27,28] and an efficient model checking algorithm for MPI [29]. One difficulty in model checking is the need to create an accurate model of the program being verified.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Formal methods applied to high‐performance computing software design: a case study of MPI one‐sided communication‐based locking

et al. 2009

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SUMMARYThere is growing need to address the complexity of verifying the numerous concurrent protocols employed in high performance computing software. Today's approaches for verification consist of testing detailed implementations of these protocols. Unfortunately, this approach can seldom show the absence of bugs, and often results in serious bugs escaping into the deployed software. An approach called Model Checking has been demonstrated to be eminently helpful in debugging these protocols early in the software life cycle by offering the ability to represent and exhaustively analyze simplified formal protocol models. The effectiveness of model checking has yet to be adequately demonstrated in high performance computing. This paper presents a case study of a concurrent protocol that was thought to be sufficiently well tested, but proved to contain two very non-obvious deadlocks in them. These bugs were automatically detected through model checking. The protocol models in which these bugs were detected were also easy to create. Recent work in our group demonstrates that even this tedium of model creation can be eliminated by employing dynamic source-code level analysis methods. Our case study comes from the important domain of Message Passing Interface (MPI) based programming which is universally employed for simulating and predicting anything from the structural integrity of combustion chambers to the path of hurricanes. We argue that model checking must be taught as well as used widely within HPC, given this and similar success stories.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal methods applied to high‐performance computing software design: a case study of MPI one‐sided communication‐based locking

et al. 2009

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“…This paper covers four MPI constructs in detail, highlighting the primary differences between our previous work [13,14] in which we wrote a reasonably comprehensive higher level reference semantics for about 150 MPI constructs in TLA+ [15]. We now highlight why dynamic verification of MPI programs is different from previous dynamic verification methods for shared memory programs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…As opposed to our earlier formal specifications [13,14], our emphasis in this formalization has been to decide what to leave out, i.e., focus on a few core MPI constructs, their constituent events, and the relationships between the events of various calls. Even so, we leave out many details of these constructs such as communicators, tags, etc., as our objective is to understand the happens-before relation under a given set of communication matches.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reduced Execution Semantics of MPI: From Theory to Practice

Vakkalanka

Gopalakrishnan

et al. 2009

FM 2009: Formal Methods

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Abstract. There is growing need to develop formal verification tools for Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs to eliminate bugs such as deadlocks and local assertion violations. Of all approaches, dynamic verification is most practical for MPI. Since the number of interleavings of concurrent programs grow exponentially, we devise a dynamic interleaving reduction algorithm (dynamic partial order reduction, DPOR) tailor-made for MPI, called POE. The key contributions of this paper are: (i) a formal semantics that elucidates the complex dynamic semantics of MPI, and played an essential role in the design of the POE algorithm and the construction of the ISP tool, and (ii) a formal specification of our POE algorithm. We discuss how these ideas may help us build dynamic verifiers for other APIs, and summarize a dynamic verifier being designed for applications written using a recently proposed API for multi-core communication.

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Dynamic Verification of MPI Programs with Reductions in Presence of Split Operations and Relaxed Orderings

Vakkalanka

Gopalakrishnan

Kirby

Computer Aided Verification

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Abstract. Dynamic verification methods are the natural choice for debugging real world programs when model extraction and maintenance are expensive. Message passing programs written using the MPI library fall under this category. Partial order reduction can be very effective for MPI programs because for each process, all its local computational steps, as well as many of its MPI calls, commute with the corresponding steps of all other processes. However, when dependencies arise among MPI calls, they are often a function of the runtime state. While this suggests the use of dynamic partial order reduction (DPOR), three aspects of MPI make previous DPOR algorithms inapplicable: (i) many MPI calls are allowed to complete out of program order; (ii) MPI has global synchronization operations (e.g., barrier) that have a special weak semantics; and (iii) the runtime of MPI cannot, without intrusive modifications, be forced to pursue a specific interleaving because of MPI's liberal message matching rules, especially pertaining to 'wildcard receives'. We describe our new dynamic verification algorithm 'POE' that exploits the out of order completion semantics of MPI by delaying the issuance of MPI calls, issuing them only according to the formation of match-sets, which are ample 'big-step' moves. POE guarantees to manifest any feasible interleaving by dynamically rewriting wildcard receives by specific-source receives. This is the first dynamic model-checking algorithm with reductions for (a large subset of) MPI that guarantees to catch all deadlocks and local assertion violations, and is found to work well in practice.

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An Approach to Formalization and Analysis of Message Passing Libraries

Cited by 9 publications

References 18 publications

Formal methods applied to high‐performance computing software design: a case study of MPI one‐sided communication‐based locking

Formal methods applied to high‐performance computing software design: a case study of MPI one‐sided communication‐based locking

Reduced Execution Semantics of MPI: From Theory to Practice

Dynamic Verification of MPI Programs with Reductions in Presence of Split Operations and Relaxed Orderings

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