research-article

Modular reasoning for deterministic parallelism

Authors:

Suresh Jagannathan,

Matthew J. ParkinsonAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '11: Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 259 - 270

https://doi.org/10.1145/1926385.1926416

Published: 26 January 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Weaving a concurrency control protocol into a program is difficult and error-prone. One way to alleviate this burden is deterministic parallelism. In this well-studied approach to parallelisation, a sequential program is annotated with sections that can execute concurrently, with automatically injected control constructs used to ensure observable behaviour consistent with the original program.

This paper examines the formal specification and verification of these constructs. Our high-level specification defines the conditions necessary for correct execution; these conditions reflect program dependencies necessary to ensure deterministic behaviour. We connect the high-level specification used by clients of the library with the low-level library implementation, to prove that a client's requirements for determinism are enforced. Significantly, we can reason about program and library correctness without breaking abstraction boundaries.

To achieve this, we use concurrent abstract predicates, based on separation logic, to encapsulate racy behaviour in the library's implementation. To allow generic specifications of libraries that can be instantiated by client programs, we extend the logic with higher-order parameters and quantification. We show that our high-level specification abstracts the details of deterministic parallelism by verifying two different low-level implementations of the library.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (25-mpeg-4.mp4)

Download
302.63 MB

References

[1]

C. J. Bell, A. Appel, and D. Walker. Concurrent separation logic for pipelined parallelization. In SAS, 2009.

Digital Library

[2]

E. D. Berger, T. Yang, T. Liu, and G. Novark.Grace: Safe multithreaded programming for C/C++. In OOPSLA, 2010.

Digital Library

[3]

B. Biering, L. Birkedal, and N. Torp-Smith. BI-hyperdoctrines, higher-order separation logic, and abstraction. TOPLAS, 29(5), 2007.

Digital Library

[4]

R. L. Bocchino, Jr., V. S. Adve, D. Dig, S. V. Adve, S. Heumann, R. Komuravelli, J. Overbey, P. Simmons, H. Sung, and M. Vakilian. A type and effect system for deterministic parallel Java. In OOPSLA '09, pages 97--116. ACM, 2009.

Digital Library

[5]

J. Boyland. Checking interference with fractional permissions. In SAS, 2003.

Digital Library

[6]

T. Dinsdale-Young, M. Dodds, P. Gardner, M. Parkinson, and V. Vafeiadis. Concurrent abstract predicates. In ECOOP, 2010.

Digital Library

[7]

T. Dinsdale-Young, P. Gardner, and M. Wheelhouse. Abstraction and refinement for local reasoning. In VSTTE, 2010.

Digital Library

[8]

M. Dodds, X. Feng, M. Parkinson, and V. Vafeiadis. Deny-guarantee reasoning. In ESOP, 2009.

Digital Library

[9]

M. Dodds, S. Jagannathan, and M. J. Parkinson. Modular reasoning for deterministic parallelism. Computer laboratory technical report, University of Cambridge, 2010.

[10]

X. Feng, R. Ferreira, and Z. Shao. On the relationship between concurrent separation logic and assume-guarantee reasoning. In ESOP, 2007.

Digital Library

[11]

A. Gotsman, J. Berdine, B. Cook, N. Rinetzky, and M. Sagiv. Local reasoning for storable locks and threads. In APLAS, 2007.

Digital Library

[12]

C. Haack, M. Huisman, and C. Hurlin. Reasoning about Java's Reentrant Locks. In APLAS, pages 171--187, 2008.

Digital Library

[13]

C. A. R. Hoare and P. W. O'Hearn. Separation logic semantics for communicating processes. ENTCS, 212:3--25, 2008.

Digital Library

[14]

A. Hobor, A. W. Appel, and F. Zappa Nardelli. Oracle semantics for concurrent separation logic. In ESOP, 2008.

Digital Library

[15]

B. Jacobs and F. Piessens. Modular full functional specification and verification of lock-free data structures. Technical Report CW 551, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Dept. of Computer Science, 2009.

[16]

C. B. Jones. Tentative steps toward a development method for interfering programs. TOPLAS, 5(4):596--619, 1983.

Digital Library

[17]

N. R. Krishnaswami, L. Birkedal, and J. Aldrich. Verifying event-driven programs using ramified frame properties. In TLDI, 2010.

Digital Library

[18]

K. R. M. Leino, P. Müller, and J. Smans. Deadlock-free channels and locks. In ESOP, 2010.

Digital Library

[19]

A. Navabi, X. Zhang, and S. Jagannathan. Quasi-static Scheduling for Safe Futures. In PPoPP, pages 23--32. ACM, 2008.

Digital Library

[20]

P. W. O'Hearn. Resources, concurrency and local reasoning. TCS, 2007.

Digital Library

[21]

M. J. Parkinson and G. M. Bierman. Separation logic and abstraction. In POPL, pages 247--258, 2005.

Digital Library

[22]

M. C. Rinard and M. S. Lam. Semantic Foundations of Jade. In POPL, pages 105--118. ACM, 1992.

Digital Library

[23]

V. Vafeiadis. Modular Fine-Grained Concurrency Verification. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, July 2007.

[24]

J.Villard, É. Lozes,and C. Calcagno. Tracking heaps that hop with heap-hop. In TACAS, pages 275--279, 2010.

Digital Library

[25]

A. Welc, S. Jagannathan, and A. Hosking. Safe Futures for Java. In OOPSLA, pages 439--435, 2005.

Digital Library

Cited By

Dardinier TParthasarathy GWeeks NMüller PSummers A(2022)Sound Automation of Magic WandsComputer Aided Verification10.1007/978-3-031-13188-2_7(130-151)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13188-2_7
Darabi SBlom SHuisman M(2017)A Verification Technique for Deterministic Parallel ProgramsNASA Formal Methods10.1007/978-3-319-57288-8_17(247-264)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57288-8_17
Sergey INanevski ABanerjee ADelbianco G(2016)Hoare-style specifications as correctness conditions for non-linearizable concurrent objectsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3022671.298399951:10(92-110)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3022671.2983999
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Modular reasoning for deterministic parallelism
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Correctness
2. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
    1. Proof theory

Recommendations

Modular reasoning for deterministic parallelism
POPL '11

Weaving a concurrency control protocol into a program is difficult and error-prone. One way to alleviate this burden is deterministic parallelism. In this well-studied approach to parallelisation, a sequential program is annotated with sections that can ...
Verifying Custom Synchronization Constructs Using Higher-Order Separation Logic

Synchronization constructs lie at the heart of any reliable concurrent program. Many such constructs are standard (e.g., locks, queues, stacks, and hash-tables). However, many concurrent applications require custom synchronization constructs with special-...
Variables as Resource for Shared-Memory Programs: Semantics and Soundness

Parkinson, Bornat, and Calcagno recently introduced a logic for partial correctness in which program variables are treated as resource, generalizing earlier work based on separation logic and permissions. An advantage of their approach is that it yields ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '11: Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

January 2011

652 pages

ISBN:9781450304900

DOI:10.1145/1926385

General Chair:
Thomas Ball
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Program Chair:
Mooly Sagiv
Tel Aviv University, Israel

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 1
POPL '11
January 2011
624 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1925844
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

In-Cooperation

SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 January 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

POPL '11

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

POPL '11: The 38th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 26 - 28, 2011

Texas, Austin, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 860 of 4,328 submissions, 20%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

38
Total Citations
View Citations
532
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)7
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Dardinier TParthasarathy GWeeks NMüller PSummers A(2022)Sound Automation of Magic WandsComputer Aided Verification10.1007/978-3-031-13188-2_7(130-151)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13188-2_7
Darabi SBlom SHuisman M(2017)A Verification Technique for Deterministic Parallel ProgramsNASA Formal Methods10.1007/978-3-319-57288-8_17(247-264)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57288-8_17
Sergey INanevski ABanerjee ADelbianco G(2016)Hoare-style specifications as correctness conditions for non-linearizable concurrent objectsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3022671.298399951:10(92-110)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3022671.2983999
Sergey INanevski ABanerjee ADelbianco GVisser ESmaragdakis Y(2016)Hoare-style specifications as correctness conditions for non-linearizable concurrent objectsProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications10.1145/2983990.2983999(92-110)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2983990.2983999
Dodds MJagannathan SParkinson MSvendsen KBirkedal L(2016)Verifying Custom Synchronization Constructs Using Higher-Order Separation LogicACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/281863838:2(1-72)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818638
Le DChin WTeo YAsai KSagonas K(2015)Threads as Resource for Concurrency VerificationProceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/2678015.2682540(73-84)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2678015.2682540
Hóu ZClouston RGoré RTiu A(2014)Proof search for propositional abstract separation logics via labelled sequentsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2578855.253586449:1(465-476)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2578855.2535864
Hóu ZClouston RGoré RTiu AJagannathan SSewell P(2014)Proof search for propositional abstract separation logics via labelled sequentsProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/2535838.2535864(465-476)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2535838.2535864
Svendsen KBirkedal L(2014)Impredicative Concurrent Abstract PredicatesProceedings of the 23rd European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems - Volume 841010.1007/978-3-642-54833-8_9(149-168)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-54833-8_9
Bocchino R(2013)Alias control for deterministic parallelismAliasing in Object-Oriented Programming10.5555/2554511.2554521(156-195)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2554511.2554521
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten