Formal specification of the MPI-2.0 standard in TLA+

Li, Guodong; DeLisi, Michael; Gopalakrishnan, Ganesh; Kirby, Robert M.

doi:10.1145/1345206.1345257

Cited by 13 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 4 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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“…DSystemJ's multiparticipant rendezvous is utilized in our security surveillance example. In this example, two serverListener CDs are instantiated on machine strange-love (Listing 2, lines [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. When the GUIListener CD asks for a specific camera controller CD, either of the serverListener might respond to this request.…”

Section: Efficiently Utilizing Distributed and Multicore Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…MPI [2] is the de facto industry standard for programming distributed systems, but being a library rather than a language it lacks abstraction and does not provide a rigorous formal MoC. There have been recent attempts to provide a formal semantics for MPI [22], [23], [24], but these do not cover the MPI specification comprehensively.…”

Section: The Rendezvous Protocolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal Semantics, Compilation and Execution of the GALS Programming Language DSystemJ

Malik

Girault

Salčić

2012

IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst.

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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: 97%

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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Formal specification of the MPI-2.0 standard in TLA+

Cited by 13 publications

References 4 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

Formal Semantics, Compilation and Execution of the GALS Programming Language DSystemJ

Reduced Execution Semantics of MPI: From Theory to Practice

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