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Studying Operational Models of Relaxed Concurrency

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Trustworthy Global Computing (TGC 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8358))

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Abstract

We study two operational semantics for relaxed memory models. Our first formalization is based on the notion of write-buffers which is pervasive in the memory models literature. We instantiate the (Total Store Ordering) TSO and (Partial Store Ordering) PSO memory models in this framework. Memory models that support more aggressive relaxations (e.g. read-to-read reordering) are not easily described with write-buffers. Our second framework is based on a general notion of speculative computation. In particular we allow the prediction of function arguments, and execution ahead of time (e.g. by branch prediction). While technically more involved than write-buffers, this model is more expressive and can encode all the Sparc family of memory models: TSO, PSO and (Relaxed Memory Ordering) RMO. We validate the adequacy of our instantiations of TSO and PSO by formally comparing their write-buffer and speculative formalizations. The use of operational semantics techniques is paramount for the tractability of these proofs.

Research supported by NSF 1237923.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A more complete language is considered in [15].

  2. 2.

    Throughout the paper we use the notations \(a \cdot b\) for the concatenation of sequences \(a\) and \(b\), and \(\le \) for the prefix ordering.

  3. 3.

    Since most proofs in this paper are not concerned with RMO we will just present its formalization for completeness, but we will otherwise ignore it.

  4. 4.

    The proof of this and subsequent results can be found in the extended version [16].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

    Gustavo Petri

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  1. Gustavo Petri
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Correspondence to Gustavo Petri .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Mountain View, California, USA

    Martín Abadi

  2. IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy

    Alberto Lluch Lafuente

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Petri, G. (2014). Studying Operational Models of Relaxed Concurrency. In: Abadi, M., Lluch Lafuente, A. (eds) Trustworthy Global Computing. TGC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8358. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05119-2_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05119-2_15

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