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Monitoring refinement via symbolic reasoning

Published:03 June 2015Publication History
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Abstract

Efficient implementations of concurrent objects such as semaphores, locks, and atomic collections are essential to modern computing. Programming such objects is error prone: in minimizing the synchronization overhead between concurrent object invocations, one risks the conformance to reference implementations — or in formal terms, one risks violating observational refinement. Precisely testing this refinement even within a single execution is intractable, limiting existing approaches to executions with very few object invocations. We develop scalable and effective algorithms for detecting refinement violations. Our algorithms are founded on incremental, symbolic reasoning, and exploit foundational insights into the refinement-checking problem. Our approach is sound, in that we detect only actual violations, and scales far beyond existing violation-detection algorithms. Empirically, we find that our approach is practically complete, in that we detect the violations arising in actual executions.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 50, Issue 6
        PLDI '15
        June 2015
        630 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/2813885
        • Editor:
        • Andy Gill
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          PLDI '15: Proceedings of the 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
          June 2015
          630 pages
          ISBN:9781450334686
          DOI:10.1145/2737924

        Copyright © 2015 ACM

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        New York, NY, United States

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        • Published: 3 June 2015

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