Formal Analysis of Memory Requirements

Shared memory provides a convenient programming model for parallel applications. However, such a model is provided on physically distributed memory systems at the expense of efficiency of execution of the applications. For this reason, applications can give minimum consistency requirements on the memory system, thus allowing alternatives to the shared memory model to be used which exploit the underlying machine more efficiently. To be effective, these requirements need to be specified in a precise way and to be amenable to formal analysis. Most approaches to formally specifying consistency conditions on memory systems have been from the viewpoint of the machine rather than from the application domain.

 In this paper we show how requirements on memory systems can be given from the viewpoint of the application domain formally in a first-order theory MemReq, to improve the requirements engineering process for such systems. We show the general use of MemReq in expressing major classes of requirements for memory systems and conduct a case study of the use of MemReq in a real-life parallel system out of which the formalism arose.