Compositional deadlock detection for rendezvous communication

Abstract

Concurrent programming languages are growing in importance with the advent of multi-core systems. However, concurrent programs suffer from problems, such as data races and deadlock, absent from sequential programs. Unfortunately, traditional race and deadlock detection techniques fail on both large programs and small programs with complex behaviors.In this paper, we present a compositional deadlock detection technique for a concurrent language-SHIM-in which tasks run asynchronously and communicate using synchronous CSP-style rendezvous. Although SHIM guarantees the absence of data races, a SHIM program may still deadlock if the communication protocol is violated. Our previous work used NuSMV, a symbolic model checker, to detect deadlock in a SHIM program, but it did not scale well with the size of the problem. In this work, we take an incremental, divide-and-conquer approach to deadlock detection.In practice, we find our procedure is faster and uses less memory than the existing technique, especially on large programs, making our algorithm a practical part of the compilation chain.

A Design Methodology for Compositional High-Level Synthesis of Communication-Centric SoCs

“…The process behavior is specified in an untimed or loosely-timed TLM style [15] following a common structure: after a reset phase (lines [13][14], there is the main infinite loop (lines [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Each loop iteration consists of three phases: input reading (lines [16][17][18], computation (line 20, hereby omitted), and output writing (lines 22-26). In particular, during the input and output phases the process communicates with other processes using the interface primitives.…”

“…In particular, during the input and output phases the process communicates with other processes using the interface primitives. With the get primitive it acquires input data that are stored in a local memory array (lines [16][17][18]. With the put primitives it emits output data on channels b, d and f , respectively.…”

“…Also, they do not handle the serialization issues introduced by the inter- face primitives offered with modern HLS tools. Deadlock detection has been studied for blocking primitives in CSP systems [17], but the interactions and the ordering among the channels was not considered. Deadlock removal has been addressed in the context of SystemC simulation kernels [1], but no approaches were proposed for preventing a deadlock and optimizing the system performance in hardware designs described in SystemC.…”

Ensuring deterministic concurrency through compilation

“…We [15] therefore used a synchronous model checker NuSMV [1] to detect deadlocks in SHIM-a surprising choice since SHIM's concurrency model is fundamentally asynchronous. We later took a compositional approach [11] in which we build an automaton for a complete system piece by piece. The result: our explicit model-checker outperforms the implicit NuSMV on these problems.…”

Concurrency and Communication: Lessons from the SHIM Project

“…Most recently [23], we took a compositional approach where we build an automaton for a complete system piece by piece. Our insight is that we can usually abstract away internal channels and simplify the automaton without introducing or avoiding deadlocks.…”