Abstract.Distributed systems for open environments, like the Internet, are becoming more frequent and important. However, it is difficult to assure that such systems have the required functional properties. In this paper we use a visual formal specification language, called ObjectBased Graph Grammars (OBGG), to specify asynchronous distributed systems. After discussing the main concepts of OBGG, we propose an approach for the verification of OBGG specifications using model checking. This approach consists on the translation of OBGG specifications into PROMELA (PROcess/PROtocol MEta LAnguage), which is the input language of the SPIN model checker. The approach we use for verification allows one to write properties based on the OBGG specification instead of on the generated PROMELA model.

State machine replication is standard approach to fault tolerance. One of the key assumptions of state machine replication is that replicas must execute operations deterministically and thus serially. To benefit from multi-core servers, some techniques allow concurrent execution of operations in state machine replication. Invariably, these techniques exploit the fact that independent operations (those that do not share any common state or do not update shared state) can execute concurrently. A promising category of solutions trades scheduling freedom for simplicity. This paper generalizes this category of scheduling solutions. In doing so, it proposes an automated mechanism to schedule operations on worker threads at replicas. We integrate our contributions to a popular state machine replication framework and experimentally compare the resulting system to more classic approaches.

In this paper we introduce a formal approach for the specification of mobile code systems. This approach is based on graph grammars, that is a formal description technique that is suitable for the description of highly parallel systems, and is intuitive even for non-theoreticians. We define a special dass of graph grammars using the concepts of objectbased systems and indude location information explicitly. Aspects of modularity and execution in an open environment are discussed.

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State machine replication (SMR) is a well-known approach to implementing fault-tolerant services, providing high availability and strong consistency. To boost the performance of SMR, some proposals execute independent commands concurrently, while dependent commands execute sequentially in the total delivery order. The most general approach to handling command dependencies resorts to a directed acyclic graph (DAG), where nodes represent commands and edges represent dependencies. In this paper we show that due to the command arrival and multithreaded execution rates of SMR, a highly concurrent implementation of a DAG is needed. We show that a typical coarse-grained DAG implementation, where the whole graph is a critical section, results in a bottleneck in the replica. We propose two improvements to the coarse-grained DAG approach: fine-grained algorithms, using lock-coupling, and lock-free algorithms. Our fine-grain algorithms lock individual vertices in the DAG. The lock-free algorithms use nonblocking synchronization, with atomic operations, and lazy synchronization to postpone physical removal of nodes. All algorithms were integrated in a parallel SMR prototype. Experimental evaluation revealed that the fine-grained algorithms are also subject to a bottleneck. The lock-free implementation, however, sports linear speedup with the number of working threads, in some cases scaling up to 64 threads. CCS Concepts• Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks; • Computing methodologies → Distributed algorithms;