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Logical relations for fine-grained concurrency

Published: 23 January 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Fine-grained concurrent data structures (or FCDs) reduce the granularity of critical sections in both time and space, thus making it possible for clients to access different parts of a mutable data structure in parallel. However, the tradeoff is that the implementations of FCDs are very subtle and tricky to reason about directly. Consequently, they are carefully designed to be contextual refinements of their coarse-grained counterparts, meaning that their clients can reason about them as if all access to them were sequentialized.
In this paper, we propose a new semantic model, based on Kripke logical relations, that supports direct proofs of contextual refinement in the setting of a type-safe high-level language. The key idea behind our model is to provide a simple way of expressing the "local life stories" of individual pieces of an FCD's hidden state by means of protocols that the threads concurrently accessing that state must follow. By endowing these protocols with a simple yet powerful transition structure, as well as the ability to assert invariants on both heap states and specification code, we are able to support clean and intuitive refinement proofs for the most sophisticated types of FCDs, such as conditional compare-and-set (CCAS).

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cover image ACM Conferences
POPL '13: Proceedings of the 40th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
January 2013
586 pages
ISBN:9781450318327
DOI:10.1145/2429069
  • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 48, Issue 1
    POPL '13
    January 2013
    561 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/2480359
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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]

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Published: 23 January 2013

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Author Tags

  1. data abstraction
  2. fine-grained concurrency
  3. linearizability
  4. local state
  5. logical relations
  6. refinement
  7. separation logic

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