Automatable Verification of Sequential Consistency

Condon, Anne; Hu, Alan J.

doi:10.1007/s00224-003-1082-x

Cited by 11 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Our method is completely automatic and is a good debugging technique which can be applied before using these methods. The approach of Henzinger et al [HQR99] and Condon and Hu [CH01] requires a manually constructed finite state machine called the serializer. The serializer generates the witness total order for each run of the protocol.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thread-Modular Model Checking

Flanagan

Qadeer

2003

Model Checking Software

134

112

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SRC's charter is to advance the state of the art in computer systems by doing basic and applied research in support of our company's business objectives. Our interests and projects span scalable systems (including hardware, networking, distributed systems, and programming-language technology), the Internet (including the Web, e-commerce, and information retrieval), and human/computer interaction (including user-interface technology, computer-based appliances, and mobile computing). SRC was established in 1984 by Digital Equipment Corporation.We test the value of our ideas by building hardware and software prototypes and assessing their utility in realistic settings. Interesting systems are too complex to be evaluated solely in the abstract; practical use enables us to investigate their properties in depth. This experience is useful in the short term in refining our designs and invaluable in the long term in advancing our knowledge. Most of the major advances in information systems have come through this approach, including personal computing, distributed systems, and the Internet.We also perform complementary work of a more mathematical character. Some of that lies in established fields of theoretical computer science, such as the analysis of algorithms, computer-aided geometric design, security and cryptography, and formal specification and verification. Other work explores new ground motivated by problems that arise in our systems research.We are strongly committed to communicating our results; exposing and testing our ideas in the research and development communities leads to improved understanding. Our research report series supplements publication in professional journals and conferences, while our technical note series allows timely dissemination of recent research findings. We seek users for our prototype systems among those with whom we have common interests, and we encourage collaboration with university researchers. This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of the Systems Research Center of Compaq Computer Corporation in Palo Alto, California; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributors to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproducing, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to the Systems Research Center. All rights reserved. Verifying Sequential Consistency on AbstractThe memory model of a shared-memory multiprocessor is a contract between the designer and programmer of the multiprocessor. The sequential consistency memory model specifies a total order among the memory (read and write) events performed at each processor. A trace of a memory system satisfies sequential consistency if there exists a total order of all memory even...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thread-Modular Model Checking

Flanagan

Qadeer

2003

Model Checking Software

134

112

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“…A large portion of this research has pertained to the formal verification of this property. Verification techniques have been proposed that range on the automation axis from being manual hand-proof methodologies [5,6], to fully automatic procedures [7,8], and many points between [9,10,11]. Here we focus on fully automatic verification of SC, and reserve the term verification to refer to such.…”

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confidence: 99%

Toward a decidable notion of sequential consistency

Bingham

Condon

2003

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures

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A memory model specifies a correctness requirement for a distributed shared memory protocol. Sequential consistency (SC) is the most widely researched model; previous work [1] has shown that, in general, the SC verification problem is undecidable. We identify two aspects of the formulation found in [1] that we consider to be highly unnatural; we call these non-prefix-closedness and prophetic inheritance. We conjecture that preclusion of such behavior yields a decidable version of SC, which we call decisive sequential consistency (DSC). We also introduce a structure called a view window (VW), which retains information about a protocol's history, and we define the notion of a VW-bound, which essentially bounds the size of the VWs needed to maintain DSC. We prove that the class of DSC protocols with VW-bound k is decidable; left conjectured is the hypothesis that all DSC protocols have such a bound, and further that the bound is computable from the protocol description. This hypothesis is true for all real protocols known to us; we verify its truth for the Lazy Caching protocol [2].

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“…Two recent works describe a model-checking approach for automatically proving sequential consistency of realworld protocols [21,9]. However, no experimental results are presented.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper describes experimental results for a variation of one of these approaches [9]. In the current paper, the observer is constructed manually, unlike the automatic construction of [9], but is designed to have significantly fewer states in order to mitigate the state space explosion problem of model checking. Our results show that approaches of this type are indeed feasible for realistic protocols.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, previous experimental results on the use of model checking for reasoning about the correctness of cache coherence protocols either prove much weaker properties, or work only on a very restricted class of protocols which don't incorporate the subtle optimizations that are prone to introduce errors in real protocols. Recent theoretical results [9,21] show that model-checking can in principle be applied to proving sequential consistency of sophisticated, real-world protocols, but provide no experimental results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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