Fences in weak memory models (extended version)

Alglave, Jade; Maranget, Luc; Sarkar, Susmit; Sewell, Peter

doi:10.1007/s10703-011-0135-z

Cited by 30 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Verifiers for weak memory broadly come in two flavours: the "operational approach", in which buffers are modelled concretely [3,17,26,29,30], and the "axiomatic approach", in which the observable effects of buffers are modelled indirectly by (axiomatically) constraining the order of instruction executions [2,9,11,15]. The former often relies on interleaving semantics and employs transition systems as the underlying mathematical framework.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The virtues of conflict

Narayanaswamy

Joshi

Kroening

2016

Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

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Modern shared memory multiprocessors permit reordering of memory operations for performance reasons. These reorderings are often a source of subtle bugs in programs written for such architectures. Traditional approaches to verify weak memory programs often rely on interleaving semantics, which is prone to state space explosion, and thus severely limits the scalability of the analysis. In recent times, there has been a renewed interest in modelling dynamic executions of weak memory programs using partial orders. However, such an approach typically requires ad-hoc mechanisms to correctly capture the data and control-flow choices/conflicts present in real-world programs. In this work, we propose a novel, conflict-aware, composable, truly concurrent semantics for programs written using C/C++ for modern weak memory architectures. We exploit our symbolic semantics based on general event structures to build an efficient decision procedure that detects assertion violations in bounded multi-threaded programs. Using a large, representative set of benchmarks, we show that our conflict-aware semantics outperforms the state-of-the-art partial-order based approaches.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The virtues of conflict

Narayanaswamy

Joshi

Kroening

2016

Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

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“…Namely, the read action in t [1] does not allow to read only the most recent value (10, n 1 ) when it takes place too early to allow the other replicas to synchronise and restore consistency.…”

Section: Propositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within this research thread, [18,19] focus on the correctness of x86 assembly code via verified compilers, [16] presents a proof system for x86 assembly code based on a rely-guarantee assertion method, [13] proposes an axiomatic model for POWER memory model, equivalent to the operational specification given in [17], and illustrates how it can be used for verification using a SAT constraint solver. A general account of weak memory models is given in [1], together with a mechanism of memory fences (i.e., barriers located in the code) that preserve properties such as sequential consistency, and an automatic generation of tests for processors implementations. Existing work on memory models also addresses higher levels of abstraction.…”

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confidence: 99%

On the Behaviour of General-Purpose Applications on Cloud Storages

Bocchi

Melgratti

2014

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Managing data over cloud infrastructures raises novel challenges with respect to existing and well studied approaches such as ACID and long running transactions. One of the main requirements is to provide availability and partition tolerance in a scenario with replicas and distributed control. This comes at the price of a weaker consistency, usually called eventual consistency. These weak memory models have proved to be suitable in a number of scenarios, such as the analysis of large data with Map-Reduce. However, due to the widespread availability of cloud infrastructures, weak storages are used not only by specialized applications but also by general purpose applications. We provide a formal approach, based on process calculi, to reason about the behaviour of programs that rely on cloud stores. For instance, one can check that the composition of a process with a cloud store ensures 'strong' properties through a wise usage of asynchronous message-passing. Also, the compositionality of process calculi enables one to define/verify middleware-services (interfacing the weak data storage with the application) to provide 'strong' properties in a transparent way to the application.

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“…Example 11 illustrates how one can guarantee strong consistency properties by introducing synchronisation actions in the processes. This approach is similar to applying memory fences (i.e., barriers located in the code) when using weak memory models [4]. Example 12 underlines that, instead, in some other scenarios strong consistency can be guaranteed by relaxing or adapting the notion of observation.…”

Section: Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within this research thread, [22,23] focus on the correctness of x86 assembly code via verified compilers, [20] presents a proof system for x86 assembly code based on a rely-guarantee assertion method, [17] proposes an axiomatic model for the memory model of POWER multiprocessors, equivalent to the operational specification given in [21], and illustrates how it can be used for verification using a SAT constraint solver. A general account of weak memory models is given in [4], together with a mechanism based on memory fences that preserve properties such as sequential consistency, and an automatic generation of tests for processors implementations. With respect to the work on hardware memory models, we consider a higher level of abstraction, focusing on consistency of replicated cloud stores.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the behaviour of general purpose applications on cloud storages

Bocchi

Melgratti

2014

SOCA

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Managing data over cloud infrastructures raises novel challenges with respect to existing and well studied approaches such as ACID and long running transactions. One of the main requirements is to provide availability and partition tolerance in a scenario with replicas and distributed control. This comes at the price of a weaker consistency, usually called eventual consistency. These weak memory models have proved to be suitable in a number of scenarios, such as the analysis of large data with map-reduce. However, due to the widespread availability of cloud infrastructures, weak storages are used not only by specialised applications but also by general purpose applications. We provide a formal approach, based on process calculi, to reason about the behaviour of programs that rely on cloud stores. For instance, it allows to check that the composition of a process with a cloud store ensures 'strong' properties through a wise usage of asynchronous message-passing; in this case we say that the process supports the consistency level provided by the cloud store. The proposed approach is compositional: the support of a consistency level is preserved by parallel composition when the preorder used to compare process-store ensembles is the weak simulation.

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Fences in weak memory models (extended version)

Cited by 30 publications

References 19 publications

The virtues of conflict

The virtues of conflict

On the Behaviour of General-Purpose Applications on Cloud Storages

On the behaviour of general purpose applications on cloud storages

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