A Simple Method for Parameterized Verification of Cache Coherence Protocols

Chou, Ching-Tsun; Mannava, Phanindra K.; Park, Seungjoon

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30494-4_27

Cited by 84 publications

(150 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In some cases, parameterized verification can be solved through a technique known as counterexample guided abstraction/refinement. One such successful attempt by Chou et al [55] is of considerable practical interest in the area of directory based multiprocessor cache coherency protocol modeling and verification. This work achieves parameterized verification purely through interactive model checking of successively (manually) refined protocols.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

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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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%

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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“…Thus, we are justified in adding the invariant as an assumption in proving the safety property. Note that this approach is close in spirit to adding non-interference lemmas, as described by McMillan and Chou et al [15,4].…”

Section: Abstraction Template Invariantsmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…The series of papers [14][15][16]4] by McMillan and Chou et al introduced an important and successful approach for parameterized verification. In this approach, which is based on circular compositional reasoning, a model checker is used as a proof assistant to carry out parameterized verification.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a promising approach to alleviate this problem: instead of building the best possible abstract model we can build a coarser model which we refine using the circular reasoning scheme of [14,15,4]. We have already used a dilute form of this method in dealing with semaphore based algorithms.…”

Section: Mutual Exclusion Protocolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have already used a dilute form of this method in dealing with semaphore based algorithms. Such a hybrid approach promises to combine the strengths of our approach and the circular reasoning approach in [14,4].…”

Section: Mutual Exclusion Protocolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Proving Ptolemy Right: The Environment Abstraction Framework for Model Checking Concurrent Systems

Clarke

Talupur

Veith

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

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Abstract. The parameterized verification of concurrent algorithms and protocols has been addressed by a variety of recent methods. Experience shows that there is a trade-off between techniques which are widely applicable but depend on nontrivial human guidance, and fully automated approaches which are tailored for narrow classes of applications. In this spectrum, we propose a new framework based on environment abstraction which exhibits a large degree of automation and can be easily adjusted to different fields of application. Our approach is based on two insights: First, we argue that natural abstractions for concurrent software are derived from the "Ptolemaic" perspective of a human engineer who focuses on a single reference process. For this class of abstractions, we demonstrate soundness of abstraction under very general assumptions. Second, most protocols in given a class of protocols -for instance, cache coherence protocols and mutual exclusion protocols -can be modeled by small sets of high level compound statements. These two insights allow to us efficiently build precise abstract models for given protocols which can then be model checked. We demonstrate the power of our method by applying it to various well known classes of protocols.

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Counterexample Guided Invariant Discovery for Parameterized Cache Coherence Verification

Pandav

Slind

Gopalakrishnan

2005

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. We propose a heuristic-based method for discovering inductive invariants in the parameterized verification of safety properties. The promise of the method stems from powerful heuristics we have identified for verifying the cache coherence of directory based protocols. The heuristics are based on syntactic analysis of counterexamples generated during verification, combined with simple static analysis of the predicates involved in the counterexamples to construct and refine inductive invariants. The heuristics were effective in filtering irrelevant predicates as well as keeping the sizes of the generated inductive invariants small. Contributions are: (i) the method is an efficient strategy for discovering inductive invariants for practical verification; (ii) the heuristics scaled smoothly from two small to one large cache coherence protocol (of complexity similar to commercial cache coherence protocols); (iii) the heuristics generate relevant auxiliary invariants which are easily verifiable in few seconds; and (iv) the method does not depend on special verification frameworks and so can be adapted for other verification tools. The case studies include German, FLASH, and a new protocol called German-Ring. The properties verified include mutual exclusion and data consistency.

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A Simple Method for Parameterized Verification of Cache Coherence Protocols

Cited by 84 publications

References 12 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

Proving Ptolemy Right: The Environment Abstraction Framework for Model Checking Concurrent Systems

Counterexample Guided Invariant Discovery for Parameterized Cache Coherence Verification

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