Asserting and checking determinism for multithreaded programs

Burnim, Jacob; Sen, Koushik

doi:10.1145/1595696.1595700

Cited by 63 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Other applications of relational methods include regression verification [13], verification of 2-safety properties [22,10], including determinism [8]. Furthermore, quantitative properties such as continuity [9] or indistinguishability [15] appear as a natural generalization of 2-safety properties.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relational Verification Using Product Programs

Barthe

Crespo

Kunz

2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

168

238

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Abstract. Relational program logics are formalisms for specifying and verifying properties about two programs or two runs of the same program. These properties range from correctness of compiler optimizations or equivalence between two implementations of an abstract data type, to properties like non-interference or determinism. Yet the current technology for relational verification remains underdeveloped. We provide a general notion of product program that supports a direct reduction of relational verification to standard verification. We illustrate the benefits of our method with selected examples, including non-interference, standard loop optimizations, and a state-of-the-art optimization for incremental computation. All examples have been verified using the Why tool.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relational Verification Using Product Programs

Barthe

Crespo

Kunz

2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

168

238

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“…Several parallel correctness criteria, including data-race freedom [26], atomicity [16], linearizability [19], and determinism [2,5] have been studied for shared memory parallel programs that separate the reasoning about functionality and parallelism at different granularities of execution. All these criteria provide the separation between parallel and functional correctness partially, as the restriction on thread interleavings is limited, for example, to atomic block boundaries.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their abstraction techniques resemble identifying irrelevant events by a dependency analysis. However, lack of dynamic information during the static verification is a bottleneck in automating their overall approach DETERMIN [6] infers likely semantic determinism specifications [5] for parallel programs. This is done by monitoring and analyzing program states during parallel executions of the program and generating pre-and post-bridge predicates [5], conjunctions of equality predicates over program variables from pairs of program executions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

NDetermin: Inferring Nondeterministic Sequential Specifications for Parallelism Correctness

Burnim¹,

Elmas²,

Necula³

et al. 2011

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A key reason for the great difficulty of writing, testing, and verifying parallel programs is the need to reason simultaneously about not only the sequential correctness of each part of a program in isolation, but also about all possible nondeterministic interleavings of the program's parallel threads. Thus, there has been much interest in techniques for separately testing or verifying the correctness of a program's use of parallelism, allowing the program's functional correctness to be tested or verified in a sequential way.Nondeterministic Sequential (NDSeq) specifications have been proposed as a means for achieving this decomposition in testing, debugging, and verifying a program's parallelism correctness and its sequential functional correctness. An NDSeq specification for a parallel program is a sequential version of the program, with no parallel threads but with some limited, controlled nondeterminism. A program's use of parallelism is correct if, for every execution of the parallel program, there exists an execution of the NDSeq specification producing the same result. Functional correctness can then be checked on this NDSeq specification, without any interleaving of parallel threads.While NDSeq specifications have been used successfully to check parallelism correctness, manually writing NDSeq specifications for programs can be a challenging and time-consuming process. Thus, in this work, we propose a technique for automatically inferring a likely NDSeq specification for a parallel program. Given a few representative executions of a parallel program, our technique combines dynamic data flow analysis and Minimum-Cost Boolean Satisfiability (MinCostSAT) solving to infer a likely NDSeq specification for the program's parallelism. We have implemented our technique for Java in a prototype tool called NDETERMIN. For a number of benchmarks, our tool infers equivalent or stronger NDSeq specifications than those previously written manually.

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“…That means for each possible input, the design must produce the same output under any valid process schedule. Determinism verification has been considered for concurrent software [15], [16], however, approaches for SystemC requires special consideration of its concurrency semantics. In SystemC context, we also show that determinism verification is stronger than both deadlock detection and race analysis, and discuss the benefits of determinism regarding enhancement of both simulative and formal verification.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards verifying determinism of SystemC designs

Le¹,

Drechsler²

2014

Design, Automation &Amp; Test in Europe Conference &Amp; Exhibition (DATE), 2014

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Abstract-Ensuring the correctness of high-level SystemC designs is an important and challenging problem in today's Electronic System Level (ESL) methodology. Prevalently, a design is checked against a functional specification given by e.g. a testcase with reference output or a user-defined property. Another research direction takes the view of a SystemC design as a piece of concurrent software. The design is then checked for common concurrency problems and thus, a functional specification is not required. Along this line, several methods for deadlock detection and race analysis have been developed.In this work, we propose to consider a new concurrency verification problem, namely input-output determinism, for SystemC designs. That means for each possible input, the design must produce the same output under any valid process schedule. We argue that determinism verification is stronger than both deadlock detection and race analysis. Beside being an attractive correctness criterion itself, proven determinism helps to accelerate both simulative and formal verification. We also present a preliminary study to show the feasibility of determinism verification for SystemC designs.

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Asserting and checking determinism for multithreaded programs

Cited by 63 publications

References 56 publications

Relational Verification Using Product Programs

Relational Verification Using Product Programs

NDetermin: Inferring Nondeterministic Sequential Specifications for Parallelism Correctness

Towards verifying determinism of SystemC designs

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